Comment 4 for bug 1592108

Yes, the thumbnailer uses 7digital (indirectly, via dash.ubuntu.com, which acts as a proxy).

The thumbnailer is a shared service that is used by several apps and scopes. It is responsible for producing thumbnails from local media files and, if a music file doesn't contain embedded artwork, trying to get artwork from the remote image server (ultimately, 7digital).

There are no privacy issues here. dash.ubuntu.com doesn't make any end-user information available to 7digital. As far as 7digital is concerned, all requests come from dash.ubuntu.com. And dash.ubuntu.com doesn't learn much about the origin of a request either, other than what it can glean from the HTTP headers.

So, turning this off for privacy reasons is not a real concern here, IMO.

I can understand the bandwidth concern. Note though that each particular image is retrieved only once, and not at all if a music track contains embedded artwork (which will always be preferred). Once in the cache, the image stays there until the cache runs out of room (which, except for very large music and image collections, will practically be never). So, you take the bandwidth hit for each song only once, not repeatedly.

I'll mark this as a wishlist item. If we get a few more requests for disallowing remote artwork retrieval, we can look at implementing this. Most likely, the settings app would get another toggle to globally disable/enable remote artwork downloads.