While I was developing the Kotlin bindings for GTK. I finally fell into the rabbit hole and discovered GdkMonitor.
What brings to my attention, is that the GdkMonitor class allows a program to read any and all data regarding the users displays, down to the specific size and makeup.
Personally, I feel as this is a tad overkill, and having seen different privacy measures different desktops provide, it feels odd having such a class existing.
Are there any plans to limit such detailed information from access via GTK? or any setting features that would disable access to the monitor information?
The monitor data comes from the windowing system; GTK by itself does nothing more than returning what the display server provides.
No, nothing like that is planned.
I also think there’s no security or privacy concern in this, given that that information is local to the system itself; you could theoretically set up the compositor (in the case of Wayland) in a way that nothing of value is ever returned—which would make writing things like a display configuration tool slightly more complicated.
It’s questionable whether the toolkit should expose the geometry and size of the monitors; after all, on Wayland, you can’t really do much even with that information. Nevertheless, it’s still used in X11 and other backends.