Guest session needs to remind user that data will be deleted

[Julian Foad]

Ubuntu gives users a "guest session" that looks and feels pretty much like a regular session, but on logging out it deletes the user's data without adequate warning. This is a serious problem because users, even long-time users such as myself, may not expect this, and somebody they care about *will* lose important data. For examples, see bug #435930: the initial report, and comment #3, and comment #7. (Those examples are from before there was a warning dialogue at the start of the session, but that by itself surely won't prevent more occurrences.)

A set of design changes to fix this bug properly would need to involve reminding the user at appropriate times while using the session that all data they store in the "home" directory is temporary. This could include changing the desktop theme and background to something visually different from a regular session; changes to the file-save and directory-browsing dialogs to remind users that Desktop and Documents and so on are not permanent storage locations, and more. I remember using SuSE Linux a few years ago, and you could log in as root, and the root session was visually distinguished in several ways as a reminder.

The behaviour of a guest session should be specified in <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SessionHandling> (see bug #882296, "No complete specification for how Ubuntu sessions are supposed to work").

Bug #435930 and bug #1270788 ask for reminder messages at log-in and log-out time respectively, but I see those as only crude attempts to ameliorate the real problem.

(I'm not sure what projects/packages this bug report should target: lightdm, gnome-session, Ayatana Design, ...)

[Julian Foad (julianfoad)]

This blueprint is relevant: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/guest-session-sane-defaults

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

@Robert: This is a proposal in the spirit of bug #435930, which is also mentioned in the description, but it's not a duplicate.