Hey Paul.
On Sun, 2023-11-26 at 11:01 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> BTW Chris, I imagine you might have some issues for this page:
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues
In which respect?
AFAICS that page is mainly about privacy (in the sense of calling
home).
My main concern is rather security, in terms of packages which download
code or similar from remote (e.g. like Firefox used to download the
binary-only OpenH264 stuff).
And we do unfortunately have quite some "downloader" packages in Debian
and no general handling of how this is done.
Some packages do it in a secure manner (IMO the best way is still to
have a fresh version of the downloader package for every new upstream
version, and the downloader package contains a hash sum of the
downloaded content - that should prevent all things like
downgrade/blocking attacks... but of course requires the package to be
kept up2date).
Now if you meant that I would want to add something to the above wiki,
because of update-smart-drivedb "calling home", then from my PoV this
isn't really necessary:
I think the purpose of update-smart-drivedb is pretty clear from its
documentation: fetching current data from upstream
(Actually I'd rather think that the --install functionality should be
outside of the tool.)
It should be obvious to anyone, that upstream will at least know your
IP from that.
IMO, that's not really a privacy issue, as its obvious.
What are rather issues is, if e.g. Firefox silently sends all kinds of
data to Mozilla (the whole "healthreport" and telemetry stuff) and too
Google ("Safe Browsing") and possibly even more.
Or when a tool like gitg contacts gravatar[0] with all emails it
encounters in a git repo, from which others could rather easily deduce
*which* repo one is working on.
Cheers,
Chris.
[0] There's an option now in it to disable it (after I've lobbied for
quite a while for it ^^), not sure whether it's on/off per default,
though.
