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Another trick for stopping your system from recording your activity.

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The gvfs service on your system records metadata about your computing activity, I will be showing you how to stop the system recording your recently used files and applications.

The file in question is in the ~/.local/share/ directory. Here is a snippet.

~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

This is an XML files that contains information about your recently opened files.

  <bookmark href="file:///media/jason/Seagate%20Backup%20Plus%20Drive/Arma%203/WP_20140205_001.mp4" added="2018-03-11T07:19:38Z" modified="2018-03-11T07:19:38Z" visited="2018-03-11T07:19:39Z">
    <info>
      <metadata owner="http://freedesktop.org">
        <mime:mime-type type="video/mp4"/>
        <bookmark:applications>
          <bookmark:application name="Caja" exec="&apos;mpv --player-operation-mode=pseudo-gui -- %U&apos;" modified="2018-03-11T07:19:38Z" count="1"/>
        </bookmark:applications>
      </metadata>
    </info>
  </bookmark>
  <bookmark href="file:///media/jason/Seagate%20Backup%20Plus%20Drive/Movies/Movies/rx-44mtnhso-xvid.avi" added="2018-03-11T07:22:19Z" modified="2018-03-11T07:22:19Z" visited="2018-03-11T07:22:19Z">
    <info>
      <metadata owner="http://freedesktop.org">
        <mime:mime-type type="video/x-msvideo"/>
        <bookmark:applications>
          <bookmark:application name="Caja" exec="&apos;mpv --player-operation-mode=pseudo-gui -- %U&apos;" modified="2018-03-11T07:22:19Z" count="1"/>
        </bookmark:applications>
      </metadata>
    </info>
  </bookmark>
  <bookmark href="file:///home/jason/Downloads/Fist%20of%20the%20North%20Star%20-The%20Movie-%5B1986%5D.x264.DVDrip.(Anime)/Fist%20Of%20The%20North%20Star%20Movie%20%5B1986%5D.mp4" added="2018-03-11T10:49:23Z" modified="2018-03-11T19:53:52Z" visited="2018-03-11T10:49:23Z">
    <info>
      <metadata owner="http://freedesktop.org">
        <mime:mime-type type="video/mp4"/>
        <bookmark:applications>
          <bookmark:application name="Caja" exec="&apos;mpv --player-operation-mode=pseudo-gui -- %U&apos;" modified="2018-03-11T19:53:52Z" count="2"/>
        </bookmark:applications>
      </metadata>
    </info>
  </bookmark>
</xbel>

Empty the file out this way.

jason@Yog-Sothoth:~$ echo "" > ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

To stop this recording data. Just make the file read-only as root.

jason@Yog-Sothoth:~$ sudo chmod -w ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
[sudo] password for jason:

Then test the file.

jason@Yog-Sothoth:~$ echo "" > ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
-bash: /home/jason/.local/share/recently-used.xbel: Permission denied

This will stop this from recording all of the metadata about your recently used files.

Further reading: http://securitronlinux.com/bejiitaswrath/get-recently-downloaded-website-file-easily-from-the-linux-command-line-with-gnome/.


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