HelpMe has a record_environment recorder that will collect a limited set of environment variables to (optionally) pass to the helper and assist with helping the user. Since the user environment can have very sensitive information, we take a whitelist approach and allow only the subset of variables that are defined in the whitelist variable of the record_environment section in the application helpme.cfg file. Here is the default base, without any additional edits.

[record_environment]
whitelist = user
            term
            shell
            path
            ld_library_path
            pwd
            java_home
            lang,home
            display

As another precaution, the user is shown the list at runtime, and asked to approve (or deny) sending the list.