Disable location services in gnome-control-center

[Jeremy Bícha]

Impact
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Mozilla Location Services will be closed to all third parties (including Ubuntu, GNOME, KDE, etc.) on June 12, 2024.

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any suitable replacement for our typical desktop and laptop users. (Mobile devices like phones may have GPS that could be used but those devices would only rarely be using Ubuntu and gnome-control-center.)

To avoid later UI changes and disruption only a few months from now, the Ubuntu Desktop team would prefer to disable location services before Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is released.

Details
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Specifically, this hides
- Privacy & Security > Location
- Date & Time > Automatic Timezone
- Displays > Night Light > Schedule > Sunrise to Sunset
  + This last one wasn't done yet, but I expect it for gnome-control-center 46.1 which will be an SRU
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/3014

Other Info
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https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/2959

gnome-control-center 46.1 to be released in a few days will also disable Location Services by default but with a build-time option for distros who have different deadlines and user profiles.

If an alternative location provider is found that works well enough for our users, we intend to re-enable this feature with a Stable Release Update if possible.

Because of this issue, Ubuntu has disabled the Location page in gnome-initial-setup for 24.04 LTS already.

[Marco Trevisan (Treviño) (3v1n0)]

> Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any suitable replacement for our typical desktop and laptop users.

When mozilla service is not used, GeoIP is used instead. It's not perfect (especially if using a VPN) but it's good enough to provide features such as automatic-timezone and night light.

[Erich Eickmeyer (eeickmeyer)]

I actually agree with Marco. If the fallback is GeoIP, maybe it's premature to patch this out. GeoIP is "good enough".

[Scarlett Gately Moore (scarlettmoore)]

Not sure how affected we are. Nightcolor uses geoclue which is disabled by default and I guess users will have to use the google option when the time comes ( not necessarily easy, but an option. ) We do not have location settings in systemsettings.

[Erich Eickmeyer (eeickmeyer)]

Scarlett,

Ubuntu Studio has `plasma-wallpaper-dynamic` which pulls-in `libqt5positioning5` which pulls in `geoclue-2.0` so Nightcolor detects positioning by default for us. Apparently, it says this:

"The device's location will be periodically updated using GPS (if available), or by sending network information to Mozilla Location Service."

So yes, you're tangentially affected, just not by default. However, geoclue does have a ton of ways to detect verses MLS, incuding Google, so that does appear to be an option.

[Marco Trevisan (Treviño) (3v1n0)]

> Nightcolor uses geoclue which is disabled by default and I guess users will have to use the google option when the time comes ( not necessarily easy, but an option. ) We do not have location settings in systemsettings.

Using google for example is an option but that requires admin access, while the g-c-c side controls whether applications have permit to access to geoclue

[Erich Eickmeyer (eeickmeyer)]

Marco,

Context: Scarlett is the lead for Kubuntu, so she's looking at it from a KDE Plasma perspective, which for her packaging purposes would need a dpkg-divert to switch the geoclue.conf to something else, but that's not exactly a problem for her as it's not a package they ship by default.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

My proposal here was only for showing location features in gnome-control-center.

I guess we'll need to SRU geoclue eventually but I don't think that's needed now.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Thank you for the feedback. The Ubuntu Desktop team is reverting this gnome-control-center behavior change and will keep location services enabled for now (even after 46.1). We'll see how things go later in the year.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-control-center - 1:46.0.1-1ubuntu7

---------------
gnome-control-center (1:46.0.1-1ubuntu7) noble; urgency=medium

  * Re-enable Location Services for now after more conversation

 -- Jeremy Bícha <email address hidden> Thu, 18 Apr 2024 12:54:43 -0400

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I am reopening this bug since we don't know yet if we will disable location services later.