Does the Plasma start menu ever send any data away?

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1

Sometimes when I type things into the search bar in the “start menu” in KDE Plasma, an item pops up slightly after the others with a “suggestion”. This makes me paranoid. Please tell me that it isn’t keylogging what I type or paste in there and sending it over the network for “suggestions” to be returned?

Sorry if this is offensive, but I’ve been forced to become very cynical even among open source/free software as privacy has become so universally eroded.

Hopefully it’s only lagged because it has to look all over the local system before showing “suggestions” which are entirely locally stored?

I also remember some scandal about Ubuntu doing something just like this 10 years ago or more. Any local search you made would send it over the network… (One of several reasons I’ve refused to use Ubuntu since, and for a long time made me internally label Linux in general as “just as bad as Windows” because of this, and further held me back from switching over.)

Also, if it cannot find anything at all, it shows a “Search Duck Duck Go for blablablabla” link. Can this be turned off? I never want to accidentally click that and thus send whatever I had typed or pasted into the local search field over the network.

2

You can turn off search plugins in System Settings > Search > Plasma Search. So, if you wanted to turn off the option to search DuckDuckGo, you would scroll down the list of plugins and turn off “Web Search Keywords”.

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3

Thanks. I’ve turned that off now. Nevertheless, my main question still stands.

4

There is no data sent away. Everything is processed locally.

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5

The “web search keywords” plugin will start web search in a browser after you type a keyword like a shortname for your search engine, but not send any data before user input.

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6

It will also show a result for a web search in the default browser even without a keyword if there are no other runner results, but yes, only once you actually click that suggestion.

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