Add a “Privacy Settings” Section to Kicksecure’s System‑Maintenance Panel

Support
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Kicksecure’s primary focus is rock solid security out of the box, and its close ties to Whonix and the wider privacy community are impossible to ignore. In practice, today’s Kicksecure installation feels much like a Whonix workstation acting as the host, with a handful of extra hardening tweaks.

Because many Kicksecure users (myself included) come from Whonix or other privacy centric ecosystems communities, a consolidated Privacy panel would be a welcome addition. It would give privacy focused users a single place to fine tune their system after install (post install), while preserving the security first and user choice philosophy that defines Kicksecure. This would help point users that ask repeated questions “about why is xyz privacy feature or setting not in Kicksecure” to go there to enable them if they need them.

Most mainstream distributions ship a “Privacy” section in settings in their DE, but those menus rarely expose the full set of controls that power users expect. Adding a dedicated privacy section to the sysmaint‑panel would let users adjust these options on demand, without enabling them by default. This also benefits anyone who runs Kicksecure as the host OS and then layers Whonix (or another VM) on top via VirtualBox or KVM.

Below is idea for each item could be presented as a simple checkbox (or switch) that toggles the corresponding setting:

[ ] Set the system timezone to UTC
[ ] Enable/Disabe Boot Clock Randomization
[ ] Fully Disable Bluetooth
[ ] Enable/Disable MAC address spoofing
[ ] Disable sending hostname with DHCP requests (reduces some fingerprintability when combined with mac spoofing)
[ ] Activate/Deactivate IPv6 Privacy Extensions
[ ] Check if GeoClue is removed and install dummy dependencies

What are your thoughts on this? Would is blur the line between Kicksecure and Whonix too much or would it be a nice addition?

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It seems a good suggestion as this offers more ‘flexibility with choices’.

Indeed, even if Kicksecure focus on security, privacy should not be behind. And no mistake, we are not talking about anonymity as a primary target of Whonix (I personally can’t use Whonix as both VPN and For are banned where I am).

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System Maintenance Panel is already growing too big and cannot be grown much more before becoming unmaintainable due to some buttons only applicable inside VM versus host. One day, it will probably be rewritten into a “control center”. But this will take time. The immediate roadmap has a lot much higher priority items and will probably take a long time to complete. (ToDo for Developers)

Related: Community Feedback

Replaceable by:

Enabled by default. Documented how to disable.
(Boot Clock Randomization)

Would be useful to have such a button.

These ones we’d like to do by default for the desktop version with documentation how to undo. If buttons will be implemented, can be decided at a later point.

There are too many unwanted packages. We cannot have a button for each of them. That will systemcheck - Security Check Application can notify and users can follow documentation on how to remove these packages.

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