I originally made a thread in the Krita reddit about this, and boudewijnrempt suggested bringing it up here.

When opening some .png files in a program called TweakPNG to view the chunk data for unrelated reasons, I discovered that Krita is quietly leaking my name (presumably from the Windows user account) into the exported files in the form of a zTXt chunk.

Digging around in the Krita preferences and menus, I found that it's possible to change "Active Author Profile" to Anonymous, however that only seems to affect newly created documents. Opening an existing .kra file and exporting a .png from it will still include the username even with Anonymous author profile selected, until it is re-saved.

This is in my opinion a very bad default setting, as it is effectively secretly leaking personally identifiable information into every file exported without the user ever being made aware of it.

In my opinion, privacy should be the #1 priority by default, and I would suggest that it should either default to the Anonymous author profile, or ask the user which author profile to use on the first startup. Alternatively ask the user which name to put in the default author profile.

Forb.Jok wrote:In my opinion, privacy should be the #1 priority by default, and I would suggest that it should either default to the Anonymous author profile, or ask the user which author profile to use on the first startup. Alternatively ask the user which name to put in the default author profile.

On launch, if there's no currently-selected profile, perhaps it should ask the user if they want to set up a default profile or remain anonymous.

If the user sets up a profile, it becomes selected as the default, otherwise (if they exit the process early, or explicitly choose anonymous) it sets the anonymous profile as default. That way it makes a best-effort attempt to give you a profile and inform you that this information will be saved to files, reducing the potential for user surprise, while still defaulting to the privacy-focused option unless the user opts in to an author profile.

Another benefit to this is the default author profile wouldn't have to be an uneditable, possibly inaccurate, and unremovable special case. Krita could still use the process it's using to create the default profile during the profile creation request, let the user edit the fields to be accurate, and then save it just like any other profile that the user can change or delete later if desired.