Positon location service

The Positon location service is a proprietary and highly privacy invasive service created by developers tied to /e/OS with their funding. There's a deliberate effort to hide that it's tied to them in order to convince other projects to adopt it, as opposed to using the similar service they host for /e/OS itself. Using the service requires uploading sensitive location data to obtain location estimates, similar to the Apple and Google location services. As with the Apple and Google services, it's a centralized proprietary service with fully proprietary data. Unlike those services, the people behind it have a history of publishing notoriously insecure software such as the /e/OS operating system itself which massively rolls back standard security, lags years behind on security updates and covers all of that up. They blatantly scam their users with false privacy/security claims for /e/OS, and nothing different should be expected from a location service from the same group of people. Multiple people involved in it are also actively participating in harassment targeting privacy/security researchers and engineers including but not limited to GrapheneOS team members.

The people behind the Positon location service have repeatedly talked about the importance they see in centralizing the whole open source community around using their service while locking out alternatives to it through proprietary data. They have spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about making services using open mapping data through claiming that it's a privacy hazard for people to have access to maps of Wi-Fi networks publicly broadcasting their SSID despite that data already being available through many commercial providers including publicly queryable databases such as Wigle. Anyone can drive around building these maps and many companies have already built them, with the data available for sale, as Positon shows with them obtaining access to it. The real privacy hazard is sending your location in real time to a service, particularly a poorly secured one from people known to cover up and downplay vulnerabilities. Positon has been built to grab as much market share as possible early on before actual open options can emerge and gather the necessary data such as BeaconDB.

The people involved in Positon have only ever cared about their careers, power and influence. They've consistently been on a side against real privacy and security, but rather focused on monetizing people's demand for it and grabbing as much market share as they can as quickly as they can with endless false marketing and attacks on projects like GrapheneOS. They see GrapheneOS as a huge threat to them due to us striving to bring people real privacy and security at no cost, which is far easier to obtain and use. This invalidates the business model of their companies like Murena. They consistently use their non-profits mainly as a way to earn money and promote their for-profit initiatives.

The service claims to be free of charge, but a core goal is turning it into a way to get data from users to build their own database that's largely not going to be available for use by others. Using it is helping them build a future business at the expense of user privacy, little different from the Apple and Google services. This is not what the open source community needs from a location service. The claims of no strings attached and the implication that it's open are nonsense. Storing as little data as possible would mean using local database for the region, not a network-based service. They're opposed to doing a local service well rather than it being their long term goal. They explicitly aim to lock out other alternatives and deter local location detection via Wi-Fi.