home permission required when it shouldn't be

[William Kent]

Per the documentation linked below, a snap has to request and be granted home permission to use $SNAP_USER_DATA or $SNAP_USER_COMMON. I think this decision is extremely counterproductive. Requiring access to the entire home folder might come across the user as an unacceptable privacy violation, even if all I need is one folder to myself. And without this access, I cannot store any persistent data anywhere AFAIK. Therefore, I would be unable to store a preferences file or similar. This is basic, expected app functionality that snap would be blocking, hampering uptake of snaps. (Unless there is a technique not listed in the documentation, of course.) I believe that this should be changed.

documentation: https://snapcraft.io/docs/data-locations

[Oliver Calder (ocalder)]

Hello, thank you for your comment. The "Data Locations" documentation was unclear about this, and has since been corrected -- thanks for pointing this out. In short, snaps do have read/write access to $SNAP_USER_DATA and $SNAP_USER_COMMON without interfaces. See (1) for the updated description, and (2) for the relevant source code which defines the base apparmor template.

(1) https://snapcraft.io/docs/data-locations
(2) https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/blob/master/interfaces/apparmor/template.go#L360-L363

[William Kent (wjk011)]

Thank you so much! I looked at the documentation. It is now very clear. This bug can now be closed. Thanks again!