Location services make it possible for applications to find out your current location. This can be extremely useful, but it can also be a privacy issue if you don’t want other parties to know where you are. For this reason, it has always been possible to disable location services, in order to prevent them from being used by applications. With 3.20, these privacy controls have been enhanced, to be more robust and to give you more control.

In the new release, access to location services can be decided per application: each application has to ask for access to location data the first time it requests it, and it is also possible to decide which applications can use location services from the privacy settings.

With the new privacy controls, applications can provide an explanation for why they are trying to access location data, which helps to make application behavior more understandable. As with previous versions of GNOME, an indicator is displayed in the top bar when location services are in use.