Hi guys. So I’m wondering, is it safe(privacy wise) to integrate my google account into my GNOME desktop, only giving mail and calendar permissions to it? It’s nice to have my calendar events into my top bar. (Please give technical answers)
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Dont?..
I think it starts pinging google servers every few minutes in the background. Aside from that, no issues I can think of.
GOA or Gnome Online Accounts basically pings the target site that has the requested WebDAV and IMAP(for the calendar, events, tasks and email). Which occurs between every 10 to 15 minutes. Every ping GOA makes contains Browser Agent information. In that case, it’s GOA instead of a browser. It contains simple information like which distribution and its version are you using. Since it’s running under the Gnome, the desktop environment name can be extracted as well. However, GOA is a standalone application that can be used on Cinnamon, MATE, and XFCE. So that part is pretty useless. But when the Google Drive is used, it is mounted to your disk with GVfsd. It has to send every action you make to that directory to Google since the directory is not physically mounted .
Thanks for the great answer. So having only mail and calendar doesn’t have much of an issue it seems.