KDE's Author Avatars and Not Phoning Home

For a long time now, KDE's about dialogues (the ones you find in the help menus in many of our apps) have supported the ability to fetch a bunch of information about the authors of our applications from the KDE Store through the Open Collaboration Services API. It does this by sending a request to the store for each of the authors who have an ocs username defined, to get the information on user avatars, profile links, and a few other potentially interesting details.

Phoning Home

If you are paying attention, you are now squinting at the screen and going "wait, I saw that title up there, and it clearly says not phoning home, and this is phoning home". You are, of course, entirely correct, and while it certainly was never done with ill intent, it is hard to dispute the fact that it is, in fact, phoning home. As a result, we have been poking about with ways of fixing this, without dropping overly much of the functionality.

Some of those crazy author people what make Discover happen

You might now be thinking what functionality, and sure, it's seems like perhaps a small thing, but remember: KDE is a world-wide community of people who work on this massive pile of software, and the about dialogue is basically the first place where many people are likely to learn of that concept, if they decide to go and look. As such, we want to put our best face forward, and in this case what we want is to firstly not be causing any undue internet traffic (because nobody wants that), but also we want to literally put faces forward.

Not Phoning Home

As of a couple of weeks ago, the KDE Store has had a simple url which will give you a redirect to the avatar that you have set on there, at the scale you need of it, and that's what we're using now. You can use it yourself as well - there's a short introduction to it over here. You can also link directly to your profile in a similar manner, by just linking to store.kde.org/u/someusername - for example, mine is store.kde.org/u/leinir.

Oh look, authors what do money managementy things!

The result is two patches, which landed recently: One for Kirigami, and one for KXMLGui. All of this was originally spawned from a desire to reduce the complexity of KXMLGui itself, and specifically removing the requirement on Attica, which while certainly not heavy, was still doing an inordinate amount of work for an arguably small gain in this particular instance.

There is more to be done on this, mind you - if you read comments on the Kirigami patch, you will notice that one intention is to expand this avatarness to support things other than the store as well, and while i do have some ideas on the topic, if you've got some, don't hesitate to give me a poke! (not "why don't you just use gravatar", that's not the point here, any expansion of this needs to be generic, otherwise it doesn't make a huge deal of sense - the reason we're doing it this way is in part that the ocsUsername field is a part of KAboutData already, and it will Just Work(TM) for anybody who already uses that data structure).

Over To You?

Part of this work could arguably have been done before (specifically that not phoning home part, which from a user perspective is a checkbox which defaults to being off), but since this was originally based on removing the Attica requirement, frankly, this particular angle is something which i must confess, sadly, to have quite entirely missed.

And that, i guess, is the point here: It is staggeringly obvious in hindsight that this was totally a case of phoning home, and while it was never intended to be that, and to my knowledge was never used like that, it took someone pointing at it and going "yeah, this is doing a phoney homey thing" for me to go "yup, it clearly is, let's make that not happen". So that's what you can do here: Be that person that points out a blindingly obvious case of phoning home to someone who's just not noticed in a decade that that's what's happening, furthering KDE's goal of ensuring our software operates in a privacy conscious manner.

Finally, a direct question: Having to tick those boxes in each about dialogue is, arguably, a little far the other direction again, and having that tick apply to all about dialogues in our software would make that bit of life just a tiny bit simpler. Not a lot, arguably, but a little is also good, of course. The question, then, is this: Is it an acceptable tradeoff in privacy terms to let this tick box affect the about boxes in all our software, or should it be per-application? Personally i'm leaning toward it being acceptable, but i wanted to put it to the wider community before diving into that bit of the code.

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The word of the day is: Care. Because we should, and we do :)