Thanks. I was trying to keep this Brainstorm away from the wider problem of 'proper' data security, and more what to do about casual or accidental leakage of data when you just quickly hand you device to someone to show them a picture or so they can make a phone call, or when you just want to show off your new device.

Well solutions like the one above seem like a kludge to me. What happens when you have installed another photo app that doesn't care about the file names? The best way to handle this is to access the device as a different user, but that means each user is going to need their own settings folders etc. The "much wider problem of 'proper' data security" needs to be solved before this can be handle in any reasonable way. At least in my opinion.

However how about locking the person you are loaning the phone to out of certain applications? This could be done with a chown that can be reversed with the entering of a password. Not elegant by any means but...

One thing to remember is that you are lending this device to a friend or a person whom you already KNOW. And extremely securing stuff might not be needed! But if you loose the device to anyone else, thats a different story. For such cases, you don't want the other guy to see ANY of your data. So, in that case, you should try locking him out.

Btw, I am interested to know about any photo viewer app that tries to open/read a .XYZ extension file? Any video app that tries to open/read a .789 extension and so on? I don't know of any. Please share if there any apps out there that do it. That would be interesting.

If there really are apps that do the above, I think, I might have another solution for that too. But for now, let's keep this as simple as possible!!

Added my solution (#4) in the brainstorm page:
http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...oaning_device/

Put sensitive files on removable card. When lending, remove said card. Problem fixed. This does leave traces like file names remaining in 'file history' list, but this is not very dangerous without the actual files, and if you have enough brains not to name them "me&she69.jpg" or "confidential_customer_data.doc".
The problem, of course, would be that the files are not in /home/... . Maybe some clever sym-links could solve this. On my fedora box, i have /home on one partition, and several /home/xxxxxxx folders on other partitions, and it works well. Also, the ability to save on card by default for some apps (like camera) might be important
Here's how the system might work. Let's say you have several calendars under /home/calendars, and some of them are private. Have a script that moves calendars considered as private to the card and sym-links them back in /home/calendars. Apps looking there would see no difference, but the files are gone when you remove the card

Thanks, that's a pretty good idea. It's a shame that it's a little tricky to remove the card from the N900, as having to remove the back cover etc. is just a little much when you just want to quickly lend someone your device in a pub.

is this correct or is it a case that the photo viewer will only open the photos from the folder you were in. e.g. im in my pics and double tap the image it then opens the full viewer and i can scroll through the pages

wouldnt a password protect folder work in this case. My use case is similar i let people play with my phones or send texts and i have nosey friends that would happily search photos. however they are average joe and prob dumb average joe with Linux, so a password protected folder would be a brick wall for them. yes they would be curious but they would never no how to get around it

is this possible i want an N900 and its this sort of thing that i thought u could easily do being a pocket computer not a phone :P

you would be right done with lending you device and would not have to care about private data and the new user would be able to do everything if something like this http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=34563 would be implemented.

working on all things with symlinks (~/$configs) to the users data and a proper user-management would do the rest, dont you think?

Lol a bit of an issue? I work as an IT Advisor for a similar trust to yours - it's the bane of my life!!!

(Sorry - very slow at seeing this thread!)

Would love to see something like this implemented (And will go votey!)

added merge solution