Disabling privacy-invasive Zeitgeist, Geoclue, Whoopsie (and NTPD)

[besouro]

Background
Release after release, Canonical's Ubuntu is increasingly turning YOUR personal computer into a personal surveillance machine enabling ad companies, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, curious spouses and the occasional Google wifi war driver to harvest personal information on YOU. Aside from that, these processes also waste processing power, memory and internet bandwhich. A couple of weeks ago, a colleague installed Ubuntu for the first time complaining to me how slow it was running on his older computer. The reason offcourse were processes like Zeitgeist and Geoclue.
Below some guidelines on how to remove some of these programs and still maintaining some basic OS functionality.

Commands
The commands below remove:
Zeitgeist: Zeitgeist is a service which logs the user's activities and events (files opened, websites visited, conversations hold with other people, etc.) and makes the information available to other applications.
Geoclue: GeoClue is a software framework that enables geospatial awareness in applications. In human language: physical location tracking software.
Whoopsie-daisy: Daemon that submits (sensitive?) crash data to the Ubuntu server.

sudo apt-get remove zeitgeist zeitgeist-core zeitgeist-datahub python-zeitgeist rhythmbox-plugin-zeitgeist geoclue geoclue-ubuntu-geoip geoip-database whoopsie

GeoClue
Because geoclue has been intertwined with indicator-datetime, you won't be able to see the time in Ubuntu anymore. To overcome this, you can download the original sources (https://launchpad.net/indicator-date...-0.3.94.tar.gz) of indicator-datetime, replace "src/datetime-service.c", "configure.ac" and "configure.ac" by the ones located in the archive here: http://www13.zippyshare.com/v/18551510/file.html. Then offcourse, recompile it and install it. All references to GeoClue have been removed. For the lazy people, a deb "executable" is also included. Installing deb files downloaded from the internet is a very bad practice as they can contain rootkits!

The SHA1 checksum of indicator-datetime_0.3.94.0.1.zip is "42962afcfd56ec8277ae007c90f740f6b99388c0"
To compare the checksum:

sha1sum indicator-datetime_0.3.94.0.1.zip

Zeitgeist
Removing Zeitgeist will cause Unity to malfunction. As I've never been a fan of Unity I didn't care. Installing Gnome3 goes as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell gnome-tweak-tool
sudo reboot

NTPD
To disable NTP call home requests on every Ubuntu boot, the following can be performed

sudo gedit /etc/default/ntpdate

On the first line, insert a new line containing:

exit 0

Note that your system time won't be updated automatically anymore from now on so you'll have to do this manually.

Result
After all the above has been performed, only the occasional connection to the following server domains will occur, mainly for keeping your Ubuntu version secure and up to date:

• extras.ubuntu.com
• ppa.launchpad.net
• changelog.ubuntu.com
• security.ubuntu.com
• ubuntu.mirrors server
• archive.ubuntu.com

The following domains won't be contacted anymore

• ntp.ubuntu.com (only once at boot time)
• daisy.ubuntu.com (sporadically called during user session)
• geoip.ubuntu.com (sporadically called during user session)
• videasearch.ubuntu.com (Sporadically called during user session, don't know why it's even used let alone by which process. If someone can enlighten me, I'd be happy to learn.)

[atenz]

That was really Helpful , thanks for In-depth Info on disabling them.

[dino99]

no needs to fail into paranoia, removing zeitzeist is enough, and whoopsie is really for the best

[rbo83]

For Whoopsie, you can set the /etc/default/whoopsie configuration file to 'false'

[MttJocy]

On the subject of ntp here for those who are truly concerned about this but would still like to actually have their time updated there are plenty of public NTP servers around you could install the NTP package and use those, or there is always the ntp pool if you don't feel like selecting servers independently yourself http://www.pool.ntp.org/

The latter are all volunteer servers which donate their services to the pool which has some several million users, I actually run two pool servers myself and it is not unusual to see 100,000 active clients on each of those on their own.

Here is a basic NTP config file which will suffice for using the pool those you might want to change the addresses to your local country zone, there is more information on the pool website

# --- GENERAL CONFIGURATION ---
server pool.ntp.org
server 1.pool.ntp.org
server 2.pool.ntp.org
server 3.pool.ntp.org

# Drift file.

driftfile /etc/ntp/drift

If you want to restrict access to your NTP server then you will want to add some restrict statements, I'll include a few examples but you should change the addresses to match your own setup. Note: If you are behind NAT then this is not necessary unless you are running on a machine configured as DMZ or with port 123 UDP forwarded to it.

# If you only have the one computer and NTP is running on the same machine then you can just have a default ignore statement.

restrict default igonre

# If you have several machines on a LAN then I'd suggest the following:

restrict default ignore

# Permit hosts on network 192.168.0.0 with netmask 255.255.255.0 change these if your network is different.
restrict 192.168.0.0 mask 255.255.255.0 nomodify

Then just change the pool server addresses in the configuration files of your other machines to server <your main server ip>

IPv6 address ranges can be permitted the same way, if anyone has any issues I am on the pool mailing list as are a bunch of other helpful people.

Hope that helps.

[Ubunterrific]

Yes, a little on the paranoid side, OP, but i really appreciate the post because i was getting sick of geoclue-ubuntu-geoip showing up and pinging out all the time, when i've always set the time settings to manual.

As far as i'm concerned, trimming the excess is a good thing towards efficiency.

I was just perusing the code on launchpad for mentionings of 'geo' in indicator-datetime (geoclue seriously needs to stop being a dependency already - i did read somewhere that it was going to be dropped for quantal?) So your files are a big time saver

As far as privacy goes - zeitgeist isn't evil. Have a quick look at the omgubuntu article for some good points: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/08/i...-spying-on-you

Nothing wrong with your suggestions at all, OP, i hope these tweaks do eventually become simply checkboxes or something, so the user has full say in what is going on behind the scenes - it's a vital part of the linux ethos to have the OS exactly as you want it.

Thanks

[cybrsaylr]

Interesting thread, I was also interested in disabling some things after noting in 12.04 how easy it is for all your recent activities to be seen!
All recent activity is easily seen by default, merely by clicking on Dash Home on top left launchpad!

However by going into 'privacy' you are taken to 'Zeitgeist Activity Log Manager' which gives you the option to delete all sorts of recent things, files, apps, history and even allows you shut off recording all log activity.


The question in does disabling and turning off the 'Record Activity' really do this, or is it still being secretly logged somewhere else hidden deeper inside Ubuntu?

[twogeo]

Thanks to the OP for the time indicator deb.
Works fine in Unity 2D, ftr.
And Unity 2D works well enough without Zeitgeist. Gnome-do does plenty good enough indexing of a plain desktop workflow, and it runs fine under Unity 2D.

For those who infer paranoia from the desire to keep services pared down - - it's not paranoia for me, but a fear of having to battle my way through a list of opaque processes when I may have no choice but to understand them - when for example troubleshooting something misbehaving..... memories of grinding through the set of default services running in Win machines are still not remote enough!

[greatsirkain]

good stuff, I'd already got rid of geo and zeit but it's nice to have confirmation, think I'm going to leave whoopsie for now, can't be a bad thing to report programs and devices that are sucky. Not bothered about unity either, it's too laggy.

[RH9R]

Besouro, Thank You so much for posting.

Without some post on security implications of latest codesets, only the techie gets to have any clue about the subject. As one of the 'lazy', I'm nervous about disabling a window mgr w/out more study. If you run across more on the topic(s), I hope you will continue to post.