Some time ago I wrote about the possibility to make activities private, that is, to encrypt the files that relate to it. And, I wrote it will be available in KDE SC 4.9

In short, it will not. You’ll need to wait, or risk your data.

Status

Essentially, the encryption works. There are also some neat features like if your screensaver is started, the current activity (if marked as private) gets automatically locked. Only one activity is unlocked at a time - it is automatically locked when you switch to another activity. The files/documents you link to a private activity are automatically moved into the encrypted filesystem and removed from the original location. And so on…

So, what doesn’t work?

There’s no UI to set the activity as private (at least, not in the Plasma Desktop). And this is intentional. Security is not something that I take for granted. Anything related to privacy needs to be tested by us before we push it into the hands of ordinary users.

This means that the implementation is there, and is present in 4.9, but it is not available to you if you don’t plan to experiment and get your hands dirty.

What are the known issues?

The files on the encrypted partition are (without custom patches to kdelibs and co.) not treated any special by Nepomuk. This means that either (1) the files will be indexed as if they were public, (2) the will not be visible to nepomuk at all (which would render the /link to activity/ useless) or (3) the files will be in nepomuk without any sensitive data and without the possibility to be reindexed. This is not something that I’m satisfied with, and I’m considering it a big release blocker.

I want to try it anyway!

If you are sure that you want to use this feature now, and want to avoid the issues mentioned above, you can do the following:

# get the uuid of the current activity: qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager \ CurrentActivity # use that result in the following line: qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager \ SetActivityEncrypted UUID-of-the-activity 1

You’ll be asked for the password to use for the encryption.

When this is done, the FUSE encfs system will be set up and you’ll be able to use it. But do use it directly - save files in the encrypted folder manually, delete them manually and so on. Do not /link files to a private activity/ don’t mark as private an activity that already has some files linked to it.

If you follow the above, you will not experience any nepomuk indexing related issues, while being able to keep sensitive data encrypted.

Edit:

KIO

Previously mentioned KIO slave is able to browse the private activities, so you have no need to know where the activity manager mounts the encrypted filesystem.