Privacy, confidentiality and disclosure

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Launchpad considers personal user data, unfixed software security issues and proprietary information as confidential knowledge. Launchpad limits who may know about it. Project maintainers and users can choose who to disclose confidential information to, and maybe choose to make the information public.

Email addresses and obfuscation

Launchpad considers all user email addresses to be confidential information. Anonymous users may not know any email address that belongs to a user. Launchpad obfuscates anything that looks like an email address that appears in text on launchpad pages and all text fields that can be accessed via the Launchpad API by anonymous users.

Launchpad will reveal user email addresses to other registered Launchpad users. Users may follow the Change details link on their profile page to select the “Hide my email addresses from other Launchpad users”.

Team email addresses are always public, they cannot be hidden.

Launchpad staff advise team’s to never use a mailing list with a public archive as a team’s contact address. Public list archives do not honour Launchpad’s confidentiality rules. Users may include confidential information in emails that cannot be seen in Launchpad, but are shown in the public archive.

Private (Proprietary) teams

When you maintain a project with a commercial subscription, you will see the visibility field on the team registration and “Change details” pages. Setting the field to Private (Proprietary) allows the team to work in private.

Non-members team cannot see that the team exists in Launchpad. Non-members cannot see any of the team’s pages. Private teams can choose to be in some public relationships, such as subscribed to a public bug, but doing so requires the team to agree to reveal its Launchpad Id and other unique attributes. This rule ensures that no one can spy on others. Private teams can also have private PPAs, mailing lists, and Proprietary branches.

See Creating and running a team for more information.

Hiding comments

Project maintainers and comment authors may choose to hide comments that they believe contain confidential information. The comment may appear on a bug, a question, or a branch merge proposal. The “Hide comment” link you see under your own comments will change the comment to hidden. Hidden comments are still visible to the comment author as well as the people the project share Private information with. This allows the user and project to continue to collaborate without disclosing information to other Launchpad users.

See Information Types below to learn about how Launchpad treats Private user information.

Bug, branch, blueprint, and comment information types

The cornerstone of Sharing in Launchpad is ‘information types’. Everything that may be considered confidential has an information type attribute that declares the type of information that it contains. There are six information types:

Public

Everyone can see this information.

Public Security

Everyone can see this security related information.

Private Security

Only the security group can see this information. The information pertains to a critical vulnerability or exploit that can harm computers or users.

Private

Only shared with users permitted to see private user information. The information contain data that is personal to a user and is not public knowledge.

Proprietary

Only shared with users permitted to see proprietary information. The information belongs to an organisation and it it will not be made public.

Embargoed, can be proprietary

Only shared with users permitted to see embargoed information. The information belongs to an organisation and it will be made Public in the future.

Every bug, branch, blueprint, and comment has an information type. The information type sets the rule used to determine who the information is disclosed to. Few things support all information types. Branches support all of them, but it is easier to delete a branch than to state it accidentally contains Private user information. Comments only support Private and Public, so the “Hide/Unhide comment” is all that is needed to change the type. In general, information that originates from the user community will support Private and Private Security. Information that originates from the developer community will support Proprietary, and Embargoed.

Projects also have information types that also to everything they contain. The default information type of a project is Public, so everything that it contains is also public. Some things, such as series and milestones, inherit the information type of their project; Proprietary projects only have Proprietary series and milestones. The things that have their own information type attribute may be set independent of the project, Public projects can have Private Security bugs. Dependents cannot be more permissive then what they depend on. You cannot stack a Public branch on a Proprietary branch. Proprietary projects cannot have Public bugs.

Sharing

Project maintainers can share information types with people to disclose all of that kind of information with trusted people. For example, sharing all Private Security information with a team allows the team’s members to see all Private Security bugs and branches in the project.

The project sharing page lists all people that the project shares with. Maintainers can review and change who a project shares with by following the “Sharing” link shown on the project’s front page. Project drivers may see who the project shares with, but cannot make changes. The Sharing will also lists all the people that share all of a kinds of information and lists the people where exceptional access to a bug, branch, or blueprint was shared through a subscription.

When Sharing with people, the maintainer is prompted to choose the information types to disclose. When unsharing with people, setting the information type to None, Launchpad will revoke access to that information immediately, then remove any subscriptions a few minutes later. Maintainers can also unshare everything with a user to revoke all access to confidential information and remove all subscriptions. Launchpad will preserve subscriptions (and access) for users who are members of one or more teams – unsharing with a team revokes access to just the people who are in the team and are not in any other teams that the project shares with.

All information types are shared with the project maintainer by default. The maintainer may choose to share with a team or user.

(!) The Launchpad staff recommend sharing with teams because users tend to leave organisations and communities, so the user must be unshared with, which is just additional work from removing a user from one or more teams.

Subscribing people to confidential bugs, branches, and blueprints will also share them when the people would not otherwise have access to the information.

(!) The Launchpad staff recommends only sharing individual bugs, branches, and blueprints with users who are working to solve the issue.

Users do not need access or additional notifications about information about information that does not directly concern them. Managing many bug, branch, and blueprint subscriptions for a user requires more labour than sharing all of a an information type with people.

When users report bugs, they are automatically subscribed to them to ensure they have access to their bug. The project maintainer can choose to unshare the bug later. When a branch is created, the owner is subscribed for the same purpose, and can be unshared with later.

Project sharing policies

Project maintainers can set policies that govern which information types bugs, branches, and blueprints can become. The policy sets the default type and what types users can change to. Public projects only have the default “Public” policy. Commercial projects can choose other policies to control the what, if any, project information is disclosed.

There is a policy for each kind of thing that can change: bugs, branches, and blueprints.

• Public

New items as public unless they contain confidential information. Items

can be made Private or Private Security later.

• Public, can be proprietary

New items are public, but can be made proprietary later.

• Proprietary, can be public

New items are proprietary, but can be made public later.

Only people who can see the project's proprietary information

can create new branches or bugs.

• Proprietary

New items are always proprietary.

Only people who can see the project's proprietary information

can create new branches.

• Embargoed, can be proprietary

New branches are embargoed, but can be made proprietary later.

Only people who can see the project's proprietary information

can create new branches.

Sharing Policy	Public	Public Security	Private	Private Security	Proprietary	Embargoed
Public	Default	Yes	Yes	Yes	-	-
Public, can be proprietary	Default	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	-
Proprietary, can be public	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Default	-
Proprietary	-	-	-	-	Default	-
Embargoed, can be proprietary	-	-	-	-	Yes	Default

Note

Embargoed branches is only settable using Launchpad API.