Upgrading to Oneiric 11.10 Beta 1 – Dealing with Zeitgeist (zeitgeist kills kittens as well)

Uninstalling Zeitgeist can cause issues as it is used by Unity and expected to be available. Removal could be a problem in the future as other programs may look for it being installed.

There are also privacy concerns, see zeitgeist kills kittens as well.

But there is a simple solution:

1. Remove the old databases and use the “–replace” argument to generate new files.
2. Then change permissions so no one can read or write to them. :-)

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# Delete previous logging.
rm ~/.local/share/zeitgeist/activity.sqlite
zeitgeist-daemon --replace

here.

# Render Zeitgeist illiterate - cannot read or write
chmod -rw ~/.local/share/zeitgeist/activity.sqlite*

here.

Note: In place of the rm command I navigated to the folder and deleted everything manually.

Upgrading to Oneiric 11.10 Beta 1 – Zeitgeist logs the user’s activities and events – files opened, websites visited, conversations held with other people, etc

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the user’s activities and events (files
opened, websites visited, conversations held with other people, etc.) and
makes the relevant information available to other applications.

These guys look like OK ppl so why are they doing something like this without express user consent?

If you know what Zeitgeist is and you turn it on to monitor what you do then Zeitgeist is great.

But if you don’t know what it is and what it does, and you haven’t been asked to opt-in… is that not a breach of your right to privacy?

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The more I look into this the more concerned I become.

I think the least we need is a pop up explaining the implications of Zeitgeist and allowing you to configure it.

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This looks like it will do the job:

# Delete previous logging.
rm ~/.local/share/zeitgeist/activity.sqlite
zeitgeist-daemon --replace

here.

# Render Zeitgeist illiterate - cannot read or write
chmod -rw ~/.local/share/zeitgeist/activity.sqlite*

here.