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With Zeitgeist now tracking everything I really think we need a privacy mode like the one Firefox offers. There is a ridiculous amount of history and caches being stored in Ubuntu from thumbnails to file history.

And god forbid you install a KDE application in gnome, then you get even more file indexers and recently used tracking! Is there a way to clear everything? Even better would be a way to run the OS in a privacy mode that never even wrote to the disk. How can I disable all caching and thumbnailing and history in the OS? Firefox provides private browsing. IE only allows you to delete the cache when you close IE. Firefox wins! Can I get a private session in Ubuntu?

Also, my company would like to run Ubuntu off an SD card. Limiting the number of writes to update a cache, history or log would be a really good idea. Switching back and forth would be perfect. Right now Zeitgeist is working on a way to clear history, but come on, can we have an option to not write a history at all? Am I missing something here?

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Interesting. I'd never heard of Zeitgeist before this question. I'll have to look into it. Thanks for bringing my attention to it. – boehj May 1 '11 at 12:22

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I am not sure this is what you are looking for, but it will provide a "privacy mode". I am citing webupd8.org:

Until Zeitgeist Global Privacy is released, install Activity Journal (don't use the version in the official Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal repositories - that doesn't seem to work), go to its Preferences and on the Plugins tab, enable "Blacklist Manager" (seems you have to double click the checkbox to enable it) - now a new "Blacklist" tab should be displayed. Here, click the add button and enter the path to your private files (porn). If you want to block all files, use "*" for the path.

You can also clear the Zeitgeist history (this is the history of recent files that's display in Dash) by using the following commands:

rm ~/.local/share/zeitgeist/activity.sqlite
zeitgeist-daemon --replace
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up vote 2 down vote

You could also start a "Guest Session" (via Logout-Menu) or create a secondary user ...

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check out this thread on ubuntu forums, might give the answer you want.

ubuntuforums Zeitgeist

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