[Bug 1255165] Re: make it clearer that crash files may contain private data and make it easier to opt out

[Gary Houston]

Interesting quote from http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology
/report-nsa-intercepts-computer-deliveries/2013/12/29/dc14c3da-70a2-11e3
-bc6b-712d770c3715_story.html?clsrd

One of the most striking reported revelations concerned the NSA’s
alleged ability to spy on Microsoft Corp.’s crash reports, familiar to
many users of the Windows operating system as the dialogue box which
pops up when a game freezes or a Word document dies. The reporting
system is intended to help Microsoft engineers improve their products
and fix bugs, but Der Spiegel said the NSA was also sifting through the
reports to help spies break into machines running Windows. One NSA
document cited by the magazine appeared to poke fun at Microsoft’s
expense, replacing the software giant’s standard error report message
with the words: “This information may be intercepted by a foreign sigint
(signals intelligence) system to gather detailed information and better
exploit your machine.”

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1255165

Title:
  make it clearer that crash files may contain private data and make it
  easier to opt out

Status in “whoopsie” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  As far as I understand the whoopsie error report procedure, the coredump will be sent to ubuntu servers if daisy.ubuntu.com requests this after the initial report upload.
  However, I consider uploading a coredump across the network (although its https) to be a secuity risk. For instance gtk applications contain a lot of private information in their coredump such as last opened filenames. The coredump is used to extract additional information which may help to fix the bug, which is fine but any information should be extracted from the core *locally* (i.e. on the machine, where the crash happened) instead of extracting them on ubuntu servers. The text of the error upload dialog states something like "do you want to help fixing the problem?" which indicates to me that sending the error is something positive. I haven't found any hint that says "do you want to expose private data to canonical?" in this dialog.
  Altogether, I see no reason for sending a coredump.

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