How to disable activity logging in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ozelot

By Mikael Ståldal

Ubuntu has mechanism to log user activity such as used documents. This is used to facilitate searching, but can also be intrusive to your privacy.

Here is a way to disable this logging without breaking Unity or any other part of the system, execute these commands in a terminal:

  1. sudo mv /etc/xdg/autostart/zeitgeist-datahub.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart/zeitgeist-datahub.desktop-inactive
  2. rm ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
  3. mkdir ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
  4. rm -rf ~/.local/share/zeitgeist

then log out and log in again.