Firefox RPM packages require geoclue2 (privacy issue)

Project Discussion
1

Today I noticed that while updating firefox, the geoclue2 package was installed as well, which seems odd, since it was never needed in the past.

A little investigation revealed that the dependency chain looks like:

Firefox → xdg-dekstop-portal → geoclue2

I consider geoclue2 a privacy issue and I don’t want it installed on my machines.

What do others think about this? Am I the only one?

Previously, I mentioned that DNF loads TPM related libraries and that TPM acts as a unique world-wide reference for each computer, but not many people cared to comment.

Thank you.

2

As far as I know DNF does not publish that GUID?
Have you seen it be exported from your system?

3

Nope; geoclue is one of the first things I get rid of on Xfce :stuck_out_tongue:

zypper rm + lock on SUSE, but I think it’s a dependency on FreeBSD for something so I disable the Xfce autostart and use config (not sure the path for Linux):

/usr/local/etc/geoclue/conf.d/99-disable.conf

[agent]
[ip]
enable=false
[network-nmea]
enable=false
[3g]
enable=false
[cdma]
enable=false
[modem-gps]
enable=false
[wifi]
enable=false
[compass]
enable=false
[static-source]
enable=false
[firefox]
allowed=false

geoclue where-am-i can test if it can find a location (default iirc reports something, above config has it seemingly hang/do nothing)