Any reason to keep location services turned on?

[emendoza82591]

Hello,

I am wondering if there is a reason to keep location services turned on for my school MacBooks? I am wondering if it is needed for any Jamf commands or services with in Jamf? Do you have any purpose for having location services turned on?

[ryan_ball]

@emendoza82591 It is helpful to automatically set the timezone, unless you are setting that manually.

[emendoza82591]

Good point. Definitely do not want to do this manually. The Jamf tech told me to leave it on and i did not ask why. Just in case i get asked why i left it on.

[larry_barrett]

I don't feel like there's a technical reason to leave it on, but, in my opinion, it adds something to the user experience. I'm enabling it for all our student Macbooks in case of distance learning in the fall. The benefits outweigh the negatives (in my case).

Benefits:
Maps
Changes Time based on location
Location Based Alerts
Find My Mac
Weather

Negatives:
Battery Life
Privacy

Each app will still have to be opted in (we're all Catalina), so the choice is still there for my end users. Blanket turning it off just doesn't make sense. My feeling is that I'll generate less tickets by leaving it up to the user.

[nstrauss]

Time zone is the biggest reason here. We do enable location services currently. Saw a Big Sur release note there will be a new MDM command across Mac, iPad, and Apple TV to automatically set time zone. Once that's in place I don't see as much of a need to enable location services, especially considering the privacy implications. That's something we'll test out more though as there could be unintended consequences where where are legit uses for it.

[blackholemac]

On MacBooks, it gets turned off here...simply because I want to set date and time stuff via a script (instead of truly manually). I've debated trying to script it through Location Services but because of PAT translations when we set up Apple TVs, sometimes it can take an hour after deployment for the timezone to correct itself when I work through location services on those devices.