Donate to e Foundation | Murena handsets with /e/OS | Own a part of Murena! Learn more

Skip to content

GPS daemon tries to access googleapis.com

  • /e/ version: 0.13-o-2020120889191-dev-hero2lte
  • Device model(s): SM-G935F

Summary

GPS daemon tries to access googleapis.com

The problem

We want to degoogle e foundation OS. But it looks like the GPS daemon still have some ties to Google.

When Netguard is installed this app shows connection attempts of the GPS daemon to googleapis.com.

GPS daemon: 1021 / android.gps / 8.1.0

Following screenshot shows the URLs logged by Netguard. To be more specific it shows only the blocked ones because I activated the related data privacy option in Netguard.

Screenshot of GPS daemon URLs Blocked By Netguard

Solutions

I have found some discussion about this behaviour on a German security blog. It has something to do with the GPS vendor image. There are configuration options in gps.conf (from Android 8.0 on in gps.xml or /vendor/etc/gnss/gps.xml respectively) which should deactivate this behaviour.

For example someone on the blog claimed that after deactivating the options below in gps.xml the problem was solved:

SuplEnable="false"
LbsEnable="false"