'Dash search' option makes no sense, and may be obsolete

[John McAleely]

ubuntu-touch/stable/bq-aquaris #17

In system settings | Security & Privacy, there is a setting 'Dash Search', with the options 'phone only' and 'phone and internet'.

This used to releate to whether remote searches were included by the managed dash when it searched the whole phone. It no longer does this, so this setting may be obsolete.

Flipping it to phone only did not prevent scopes from searching the internet.

Should this setting still exist?

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

On OEM bug #1422174, vtuson said:

"Under privacy in system settings, we have an option called Dash search, that gives you the choices of phone or internet and phone. This I think was when the old manage dash allowed you to search anything. However , we dont have this feature anymore.. I think it should be remove from settings. Worth checking with mpt"

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

@mpt - does victor's comment in #1 make sense?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks, but that setting is not obsolete no and is not related to the manage dash, it restrict datas from the dash to local content only. When set to "phone only" the video page is not listing youtube content for example

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

Understood. I think this needs some sort of review by design - how do users know that the 'video' scope is affected, but the 'nearby' scope is not?

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

I think the question is why the other scopes are not honoring the setting

[Thomas Strehl (strehl-t)]

Regarding comment #4: just open the settings of your video scope and uncheck "display results from youtube" and you're done. Alternatively, just favor the local video scope instead of the video aggregator to reach the same result. All this wasn't possible with old scopes, but as it is now this privacy setting can and should go away.

[Iain Lane (laney)]

We're doing this now?

If I don't want my searches to go out, how am I supposed to achieve
this? (Or, better, any traffic from the dash.)

Is it by disabling scopes and/or services in them? Do I have to employ
vigilance after every update to make sure that my searches stay local? For
example, if an update is pushed out that adds a new service to the music scope,
how will I know that I have to go and re-check?

I guess I'm supposed to un-favourite the aggregate scope and instead favourite
the 'My Music' one. To me this doesn't seem intuitive, and difficult to achieve
in general. It requires me to either never install a new scope, or to somehow
know which ones can access the internet.

Seems like it would be better to instead fix this option to work properly. Do
all the scopes run through some process or framework which could mediate
internet access? Or maybe apparmor could be used somehow?

The final option is to give up and say that, since we don't support this for
apps in general, we won't for scopes. We already consider scopes to be a
special part of the OS and impose constraints on them, so I'd hope that we
don't have to go down this road.

[Michi Henning (michihenning)]

You are trusting all installed software to not silently change behavior behind your back when you install an update. Scopes are no different. Also, a scope can't just change the setting behind your back because the DB is not accessible to the installer.

[Iain Lane (laney)]

Fine. I don't think you fully engaged with my argument, but I think the decision is made and I cannot change it.

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks)]

I guess the model for scope should be similar than the ones for apps: when installed, if the scope tries to reach the network for the first time, then we get the "allow <scope_name> to acess the network. You set it to yes and no. Similar behavior if the scope wants to access the GPS position and so on. Departments as well (and so new updates adding new sources) should follow the same realm.

Basically scopes would behave likes applications in that regard for the security policy.

[Michi Henning (michihenning)]

From memory, that model was rejected by design long ago because it makes for a bad user experience: the first time someone runs a query on an aggregator, they are confronted with a whole series of prompts. Also, the scopes can't do that themselves because they don't have access to the display. And it's difficult for the shell to do this, because the shell can't know what child scopes are below an aggregator.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I sympathize with Iain's viewpoint, and I look forward to seeing whether <https://fixubuntu.com/> is updated to cover Ubuntu Touch. However, the breadth of the Dash in Ubuntu Touch makes a global Dash setting infeasible. If it existed and was set to local searches only, the Ubuntu Store, News, Today, and NearBy [sic] scopes would not work at all, and the Videos scope would usually be a wasteland. If those were standalone apps, as their equivalents are on other mobile platforms, then a Dash privacy setting would become feasible.

Anyway, this does not require any design work: for the reason I just described, I removed the "Dash search" setting from the design in April 2014. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityAndPrivacySettings?action=diff&rev2=39&rev1=38>

(It's nice to be wanted, but the design specification is the #1 result in a Google search for "Ubuntu Security Privacy settings". If anyone has ideas for how to make it even easier for people to check the spec, before saying things like "Worth checking with mpt" or "this needs some sort of review by design", please let me know.)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ubuntu-system-settings - 0.3+15.10.20150527-0ubuntu1

---------------
ubuntu-system-settings (0.3+15.10.20150527-0ubuntu1) wily; urgency=medium

  [ CI Train Bot ]
  * New rebuild forced.

  [ Iain Lane ]
  * Improve filtering in main page and timezone filters. (LP: #1454186,
    #1446086)

  [ Ken VanDine ]
  * Ensure dim-timeout is 10 seconds less than activity-timeout (LP:
    #1437510)
  * debian/control: bumped depends on ubuntu-keyboard-data to >=
    0.99.trunk.phablet2+15.04.20150421 to get gsettings schema changes
    (LP: #1454230)
  * expose deviceName to QML

  [ Lukáš Tinkl ]
  * compare the language and kbd layout names in a locale-aware manner

  [ Sebastien Bacher ]
  * Translate push_helper expected strings to avoid failure in non C
    locales (LP: #1456941)
  * [battery] use the correct height value for the first point of the
    graph, that fixes the initial point often starting to high and the
    curve starting with an almost vertical line (LP: #1439122)
  * [language] update auto punctuation description to match the osk
    behaviour (LP: #1385288)
  * [security-privacy] remove obsolete dash search option (LP: #1422700)

  [ jonas-drange ]
  * New icon as per lp:1457424 (LP: #1457424)

 -- CI Train Bot <email address hidden> Wed, 27 May 2015 09:23:37 +0000

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package unity-scopes-shell - 0.5.4+15.10.20150601-0ubuntu1

---------------
unity-scopes-shell (0.5.4+15.10.20150601-0ubuntu1) wily; urgency=medium

  [ CI Train Bot ]
  * debian/libscope-harness1.symbols: update to released version.

  [ Pawel Stolowski ]
  * Don't pass the old privacy setting flag down to scopes. (LP:
    #1422700)
  * Fix 'Display results from' string. Remove custom copy of
    FindIntltool macro and use cmake-extras instead. Include
    translations in the deb file.
  * Provide python bindings for settings test harness.
  * Scope harness: added support for settings. Fixed broken symbols line
    of the initial harness commit, added new symbols (and sorted all the
    symbols). Added helper tool for generating symbols taken from unity-
    scopes-api. added: src/scope-harness/internal/settings-view-
    arguments.h src/scope-harness/matcher/settings-matcher.cpp
    src/scope-harness/matcher/settings-matcher.h src/scope-
    harness/matcher/settings-option-matcher.cpp src/scope-
    harness/matcher/settings-option-matcher.h src/scope-
    harness/view/settings-view.cpp src/scope-harness/view/settings-
    view.h tools/symbol_diff

 -- CI Train Bot <email address hidden> Mon, 01 Jun 2015 15:54:02 +0000