Comment 4 for bug 967056

To add to Colin's comments, here are a few suggestions for improvement on the privacy settings screen:

The "Recent Items", "Files" and "Applications" tabs all deal with data that is stored locally for indexing, while the "Diagnostics" tab is the only one that deals with data that can potentially be sent to Canonical. This should be clarified.

The wording on the first tab is very vague:
"Forget activities:
Every time a file or an application is used, some information can be stored. This activity can be used to retrieve files during searches or as history in applications"

A more precise wording could help clarify (avoid using "can", replace the vague "activity" by "data", explain the indexing and clarify that it is stored locally), such as:
"Every time a file or an application is used, some data is stored and indexed on your own computer. This data is then used to retrieve files during searches or as history in applications."

You could then expand on this (not sure how correct the following is but you get the gist):
"This indexed data helps speed up searches and find recently used documents again but it uses a certain amount of disk space and could provide valuable information on your activity should your computer become lost or stolen. Ubuntu allows you to decide how much is logged."

On the File tab, it would be good to explain the impact of checking any of the options: e.g. if I click "Image", does it mean that I will be unable to find images anymore, will it restrict image searches or just slow them down? At the moment, users are faced with 9 check boxes, some are obvious file types, some seem to be application types + an empty box below but have no way to understand what would be the impact of changing any of those settings.

Same comment for the Applications tab.

Also, it would be good to have consistent wording. The "Recent Items" tab talks of *storing* information or activity while the File tab says *record* activity and the Applications tab says *log* activity.

On the Diagnostics tab, make it clear that by default Ubuntu does not send any information to Canonical but that sending crash information is a great way to notify the developers of a problem so that it can get fixed and that it will not be used for any other purpose.