Hello!

As I read through the announcements of the latest KDE Plasma 5.12 update I read that there should be an option now to use "private activities" like private tabs in current Internet browsers. Since the different search mechanics in KDE have lots of privacy issues in my opinion that seem not to be addressed anytime soon I am very interested in using a private activity that works (/as I imagine) in away that it's not tracked by "recent documents", files excluded from baloo and do not show up in the search and krunner utilities... at least this would be a kind of workaround the privacy issues with these functions.

Edit, added from the release announcement of plasma 5.12:

KActivities

Adding the option not to track the user when in specific activities (similar to the 'private browsing' mode in a web browser)

Don't get me wrong:
1) - "Recent documents" is a nice feature just it's not customizable because at the moment I cannot exclude files or applications for showing up in the kicker menu

2) - The desktop search applet and krunner seem not to share the same settings though I might be wrong here... and I do not find any tuning settings here (just disabling searching for files really doesn't cut it!)

3) - I get that I can exclude folders from being indexed with baloo but that seems very clumsy as I can't exclude individual files in any easy to handle way (you can move any not to index files into a special folder or make them hidden but I still think there should be a "don't index flag" in the individual file or folder properties...)

4) - The activity tab in the system settings offers excluding certain applications from being tracked in the actitivies... I have to admit I do not fully understand what that does and on playing around with these settings I do not think this works as intended (here also I might be wrong but there is no explanation anywhere to find...)

These are some of the major problems I have with the privacy options I have in the current KDE and at the moment it seems I have to exclude a bank balance spreadsheet for example on many different services to reliably hide it from all these different search and indexing functions. Not to mention that the KDE settings are completely ignored by many applications that seem to include an own file history...


Now that is why I am glad to read about the possibility to use private activities. Sadly I do not find any documentation.

So: How can I enable and use this feature and can it be used to solve the above issues?

thx for any help or explanation,
piedro