[QGIS-Developer] QGIS and privacy

[Nyall Dawson]

On Wed, 24 Mar 2021 at 06:36, Totò <pigrecoinfinito at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The problem is that many users don't know that by sharing a project file they
> share some personal data. LibreOffice lets the user decide.
> The main point is that the average user is not aware of all this, saving a
> project there is no message that warns me of what is happening, and the
> variables are reachable only in the advanced settings and are not within
> everyone's reach. . . .
>
> A user must be able to choose consciously and not have imposed a choice on
> the part of others.
>
> An example: the @project_author variables will always contain the name of
> the author of the project and not everyone is aware of it;
> @user_full_name contains the name of the user who is using the project and
> if I used both variables as a copyright decoration and shared a screenshot,
> I could unknowingly share data even from people other than the author of the
> project.
>
> In my opinion the user must be aware and the only way is to change the
> current default value of the "projects \
> anonymize_new_projects "e
> "projects \ anonymize_saved_projects"

I would propose that this situation could be handled by a new
first-run configuration wizard. I.e. if QGIS has never been used on
the machine, the user gets a welcome wizard and one of the questions
asked is "should projects be anonymized".

The tricky bit is that corporate users would need a way to disable the
configuration wizard in their setups, or at least disable parts of it,
as they may have corporate policies which eg require all users data to
be stored in the projects they make...

Nyall