What personal-ID data is shared when I share my fusion 360 files (if any)?

[Anonymous]

Hi! I'm somewhat of an influencer in the 3D printing community (I mod /r/3D Printing and the largest 3D printing Discord), and as such I have a few very scary fans, and a couple of crazy folk I've had to ban along the way. 

I want to share my Fusion 360 designs and STLs online, but I'm worried that some of the more clever and persistent folk might be able to work out how to find me in real life if I do. 

So my question is, what personally identifiable data is shared when I share my fusion 360 files?  

Can other users see the IP of my computer? Can they see the name or file paths of anything on my computer? Can they see the email address I signed up with? Can they see my location? Etc etc.

I want to know about anything and everything that could be used to find me, if there is anything. 

Like I said, I really really want to share my files. I love Fusion 360, and tell everyone to use it. 

But I want to make sure I'm safe. 

[Anonymous]

(also same question for exported STL Files)

[matt.pooley · Accepted solution]

Hi,

This is a really interesting question and prompted me to explore (and do mild hacking of) some of the data sharing technology we have in Fusion to understand how private it is. The results of the mechanisms I explored are :

• Public Share of Fusion data - This retains a link to your live data and it is possible to discover the email address of the hub owner through a public share, definitely not recommended if you want to retain anonymity
• Export of a Fusion Archive - This is better, it doesn't contain direct references to your identity, but if the model is an assembly the links between parts can include references to file paths on your local disk (to enable use of locally cached files when available). These are hard to extract, but may be present.
• Export of a neutral file format - STL is fine, through both the desktop client and through the web interface there is no personal data in the model. STEP is not as good, if a STEP export is done through the desktop client then it embeds both filepath and email information in the header of the file, if the export is done through the web interface then the resulting file is anonymized, although it does include any personal information you may have entered in the Properties of the model.

My summary is that if you would like to ensure anonymity, use STL, with export of STEP through the web interface an alternative that provides a richer output (it includes materials and properties).

Regards,

Matt Pooley

On Behalf of the Fusion Dev Team

[Anonymous]

Thank you so very much Matt, 

I really appreciate the extents you went to here to gather this answer! 

I was also impressed by the speed of reply. Thank you!

Sorry I, myself,  didn't reply sooner, for some reason the mobile site wouldn't take me to a password page after entering my email, even in desktop mode, so I could only like and resolve this via email. Anyway, got to my PC, and just wanted to say thanks so much! 

[Anonymous]

Can we please get a setting to anonymize files for those who are not interested in releasing any unnecessary PII for defense in depth reasons?

Ideally it would strip all unnecessary metadata in exports, including username, and any filenames.  Also valuable would be an ability to hide your name in the main interface if that is desirable for recording videos, for instance. 

Fusion is a fantastic modeling program but it needs better privacy controls.

[matt.pooley]

Hi again,

There has been some pretty energetic follow-up around this topic, so I wanted to share what is happening now and what the Fusion teams thoughts are going forwards.

The immediate actions taken on by the team are :

• Change the public share implementation so user data is not visible through the method I used (in progress, no ETA just yet but will be released asap)
• Explore the public share implementation further to look for other unexpected leaks that I didn't discover
• Modify the STEP export workflow so it doesn't include personal data (again, in progress, am hoping to get the change into a release around the middle of May)

Alongside these immediate actions, we will also be doing a broader check of our export workflows with a 'privacy first' mentality, looking for places where we can increase anonymity. This is likely to take a little longer and will likely result in incremental improvements over the coming months.

Going further into the future, once we are comfortable that we have achieved 'privacy first', we may reverse course and look for opportunities to add user managed privacy controls. I can't commit to anything specific in this area but definitely welcome the suggestions that have been made and would also welcome any additional areas of concern people have where Fusion is less private than it could be right now. (The suggestion about obscuring user name in the title bar is a great example of something we may not have recognized on our own, but which is very relevant when tools such as Screencast are being used.)

Thank you again for the engagement and looking forward to your thoughts / suggestions,

Matt.

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much for looking into this so quickly and diligently, I really am so impressed! 

The actions taken thus far and those proposed sound wonderful. I particularly like the thought and care put into the screen-casting, which is another area I've wanted to explore but haven't felt comfortable doing. 

I'd love to stay abreast of this news as it develops, it this the bet place to do that? 

Is there anything that I, or the greater community can do to help? 

Thanks Again, Matt! I really appreciate how seriously this is being treated, and how quickly you've taken action. 🙂 

[matt.pooley]

Hi Billie,

I will be providing intermittent follow-up information here as we make and rollout changes. I can also offer my email address, matt.pooley@autodesk.com, as a way to ask direct questions or inquire about status.

Both the removal of personal data from public shares and the removal of 'author' information from exported STEP files are going through testing at the moment, and I've been able to dig into the new public share implementation to confirm that I can't get to anything unexpected. The public share change should go live next week (barring any late discoveries during testing), with the STEP file change being included in the next major Fusion client release. (We do major releases roughly every 6 weeks, and the last was on April 8th).

There is another piece to the STEP export work, which is that the filename used for export is included inside the file, since most users will be exporting to a location such as their Desktop or Documents folders, this filename will include your system login name.  If this is a concern, exporting to a location outside of the users home folders will avoid it while we work to clean things up. (It is proving surprisingly hard to remove on our side, coming from deep in the bowels of our code). The project to obscure user name while Screencast is running is underway as well, current thinking is that this behavior will be exposed as an option to ensure that it can function as a 'watermark'  for users who want to maintain ownership of their content while also allowing others to be more anonymous.

Regards,

Matt.

[Anonymous]

This is all super wonderful, Matt, thank you so very much for all your hard work. I deeply appreciate the time, thought, and effort you are putting into this. It sounds like you've made some awesome improvements already and I'm totally blown away by the decisiveness and speed at which you and the team have been able to react. 

I'll keep sharing these updates in the circles I frequent so people are aware of the developments. I'm so excited at the prospect of being able to share files and make screen casts! Thank you!

[matt.pooley]

Hi,

Time for one of the intermittent updates I mentioned.

The change to public shares which prevents them leaking personal information about the sharer did go live a few weeks ago and I have so far been unable to find anything unexpected being exposed (there is an open invite to people smarter than me to take a look though). We also included the change to remove user names from exported STEP files in the Fusion 360 release that went out on Monday (20th May).

The next active change, optionally obscuring personal data while running Screencast, has gone through a couple of iterations, we are now looking at a user controlled 'Incognito Mode' that when turned on would hide the user name as well as other personal data that we discover as we go through the product. Initially this mode might just hide the name in the top right, but over time it would be expected to expand to hide names in the Comments tool and in the Data Panel as well as any other areas where personal information could accidentally 'leak' during a Screencast or similar. If people are aware of other areas that should definitely be covered by this, please let me know at matt.pooley@autodesk.com and I'll add to the list.

Regards,

Matt.

[Anonymous]

Oh! I missed this update!

This is wonderful, wonderful news, Matt!

I deeply appreciate the care and dedication you have made to this task, it's just so great. You're such a star! Thank you!! 

[Anonymous]

Looks like the exporting of a STEP file removes any personal information.  Matt, can you confirm if the removed "personal information" would include any reference to company name or the individual user - i.e. any of the individual name/initials or company name/address/contact info, or part numbers, etc that would normally be found on a typical title block?

[thidwick_tbhm]

For anyone finding this in 2022, the STEP file still includes path information which can reveal your username and allow people to infer your host operating system. Running "strings" against the f3d archive didn't turn up anything concerning, but it's possible that data is packed in a non-text format.

[GoofBallSPJPF]

As of April 2023, one step file I generated has the filename, but NOT the path.

As far as I can tell, there is NO personal information in the step file.   Can anyone else confirm?

It'd also be nice to hear about the current status of personal ID in f3d and f3z files....

[misc_engineering]

Looking for an update to the same question.

What personal data do f3d/f3z export files contain?