Interestingly, despite being a privacy risk, the inadvertent inclusion of metadata such as absolute paths may aid computer forensics experts and the law enforcement as the path could reveal system usernames. Other proposed workarounds included varying parameters like system time, username, timezone, locale, hostname, and so on. Even though this resulted in a smaller binary size, it doesn't wipe out source file names from the binary,' stated developer Dmitry Zakablukov in August 2020. 'I have tried to turn on 'abort' for panic in release profile. Since Rust project, at the time, did not fix this issue, some workarounds were proposed by the community members, such as using the 'abort upon panic' option, but unfortunately none of these worked. However, over years, many more developers were left surprised to notice such information being included not just in debug builds but their production Rust builds as well and pushed for a change.īleepingComputer readers have also reached out to us on more than one occasion sharing their thoughts on the issue. On a first glance, this 'leak' of usernames and absolute paths may seem trivial to a reader. 'In 2020 people care about privacy and this can be a put off like rust-lang/mdBook#847 where people actively worked away from the project due to the disrespect of user privacy,' said the developer referring to a Rust project called mdBook. 'If it helps, you including user ids like this violates GDPR. so this should be addressed by the rust team.' They further expressed in the same thread:

These absolute path names revealed the developer's system username and the overall structure of directories, including the home directory.

Rust language