Information privacy

[mathieu chomarat]

Hi Wackou,

As the software goes to look through the internet information about
your media files, I'd like to know if it's reliable in terms of
privacy of information.

Thanks for your comments, it seems like a great software!

Mat

[Nicolas Wack]

Hi Mathieu,

thanks for your question, it is a very good one. I will actually
update the FAQ on the website so that it appears there!

We do take privacy issues very seriously; Smewt is a Free Software
project and we do believe that freedom of information as well as
privacy are very important concepts, too often neglected in our modern
society...

To answer your question in a technical way, approximately the
following happens when Smewt tries to guess which media you have on
your computer:

Let's say you have a file which is called "/my data/my series/Big bang
theory/season 1/the.big.bang.theory_1x07_the_dumpling_paradox_xvid_720p.avi"

- it takes the filename and slices it in its sanitized (ie: no dots,
underscores, ...) different constitutent parts:
[ ''my data', 'my series', 'Big bang theory', 'season 1', 'the',
'big', 'bang', 'theory', '1x07', 'the', 'dumpling', 'paradox', 'xvid',
'720p', 'avi' ]

- from there, it identifies as much as possible, in this case:
- tv show: Big bang theory
- season: 1
- episode number: 7
- codec: xvid
- format: 720p

- with this information, it uses what's required to identify it, that is:
- tv show: Big bang theory
- season: 1
- episode number: 7

and looks it up on the internet using TheTVDB (http://thetvdb.com/)

- it then uses the information it gets back to set it locally

So in the end, the information you send over the internet is exactly
the same as if you'd gone to TVDB and typed "big bang theory" in the
search box, and that's it. Also note that TVDB is an open and free
database which doesn't do any tracking of user requests (I think), so
you are completely anonymous and there is no sensitive information
that is sent (ie: the filename is not sent at all, only the necessary
and sanitized required information to be able to identify it)

Note that for movies we use TheMovieDB (http://www.themoviedb.org/)
which is a similar open and free database for movies.

Also note that if in the future we implement features which requires
information that could be sensitive, we will definitely warn you
before and all those features would be opt-in, not opt-out (ie:
nothing will ever be forced on you, you will have to explicitly say
you agree to something before we use any of your information)

Hope this answers your question,

Nico.

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 8:10 PM, mathieu chomarat <m.cho...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Wackou,
>
> As the software goes to look through the internet information about

> your media files, I'd like to know if it reliable in terms of privacy