[SOLVED] How to stop KDE from tracking visited websites?

[doctordruidphd]

It's bad enough dealing with google, doubleclick, and all the rest of that garbage, but when you own desktop tracks visited websites, that's too much. What I discovered is that going into KDE launcher, and typing something in the search bar, brings up a whole boatload of visited websites. Since I am using mostly Firefox, I don't see how that all got there. How do I clear ALL of that out, and stop it dead cold from doing it any more?

[claydoh]

It is probably via the browser integration Firefox plugin that is prompted in the system tray when the browser is first run. This has been the norm for a few releases now, I believe, if not longer.

You can tweak settings in a couple of places:

via the plugin's settings:



And/or via the Search options in System Settings - this is shared between Krunner and the Launcher.

[doctordruidphd]

Thanks for your reply.

1. I don't have the plasma-integration extension installed, and maybe that's for the better.

2. I didn't realize that Krunner was shared with the launcher; I disabled as you indicated.

3. Also, I found another suggestion at
https://askubuntu.com/questions/3258...ry-integration

For KDE 5:
Copy /usr/share/kservices5/plasma-runner-bookmarks.desktop
→ ~/.local/share/kservices5/plasma-runner-bookmarks.desktop

Replace a line X-KDE-PluginInfo-EnabledByDefault=false.

I did both 2 and 3, and this seems to have stopped it.

[kubicle]

#3 just controls which runners are enabled by default, so it's redundant if you disable the runner in System Settings (or krunner settings) in step #2.

Note that if you think your browser history is a privacy issue, krunner is not really the problem (it just shows what's in your history and this information is trivial to get by other means...like by opening your browser). You probably should configure your browser to not save your history if you think it's an issue.

[doctordruidphd]

Note that if you think your browser history is a privacy issue, krunner is not really the problem (it just shows what's in your history and this information is trivial to get by other means...like by opening your browser). You probably should configure your browser to not save your history if you think it's an issue.

Yeah, that's what I don't get. Firefox is configured to not save history, to delete all cookies on exit, etc. etc., but somehow that info showed up in the launcher anyway. Well, used to, not any longer.