So I finally got a reply from them after sending an email last weekend.
Hello,
Thanks for your interest in our service. Sorry for the delay in replying to your message, but as we're entirely based on volunteer work and your questions required some coordination to get the reply right, it took a little longer. As a general remark: We've started Positon in a rush to make sure it's available ASAP after MLS was shut down. The first two weeks we even ran without any website and the current website still lacks a lot of useful information. This will be added later on, but to date we focus on providing a good service rather than a good website.
- Who is behind Positon?
Positon is developed and run by open-source enthusiasts. We've previously used microG and when it was announced that MLS was going to shut down, we wanted to ensure there will be an alternative, so we can continue to have network-based location. We got in touch with microG developers early to ensure we can provide the best possible service for them, and early on they pointed out that there are other open-source users than microG that would suffer from the loss of MLS, and so we decided to make Positon available outside of microG as well.
- What is your relationship to /e/OS?
We obviously became aware of claims on the internet, that we would be somewhat related to /e/OS, which perplexed us. The truth is that no /e/OS developer has ever contributed to Positon and we also did not receive any funding from them. In fact, one of our contributors was previously publicly criticizing /e/OS for not delivering security updates in-time. /e/OS, as of now, never contacted us to ask for access or an API key to our service. We later learned that the claims are based on the fact that we work with microG, which itself is sponsored by /e/OS. The claim of our relationship reworded from "developers from /e/OS" to "developers tied to /e/OS", so now you know what ties we have and I guess the claim "with their funding" is solely based on /e/OS sponsoring microG and microG advising us free of charge.
- How are you funded and what is your strategy to keep the service running?
We don't have any funding. We got access to the commercial database free of charge, for as long as we restrict our service to non-commerical open-source usage and no similar freely available service with reasonable quality exists. We also got free server resources from a hosting company for the time being. And the people working on Positon are doing so entirely unpaid. Positon is a non-commercial offering and always will be. When it comes to long-term strategy, the strategy is to turn Positon off, once a proper successor of MLS (fully open-source and based on user-contributed data) emerged and has enough data to be used in practice.
- How are you processing the privacy-sensitive location data submitted by users?
As a general remark regarding privacy, I suggest to check out our privacy notice at https://positon.xyz/docs/privacy/ which is concise and easy to read (as we're not commercial, it also doesn't include commercial bullshit). At this point - as we don't support user submitting data yet - we absolutely do not store any location related data of users. To protect our service, we keep a log file of incoming request metadata, with IP addresses anonymized.
Additionally, we have worked with the microG developers and introduced capability for aggressive caching on the client to ensure that client devices don't have to do more requests to our service than absolutely necessary. This is in our own interest, as it means we have less requests to process, but it also means that even if we wanted to, we couldn't keep a record of a users location history.
- Will you support geosubmit API in the future and how will you use this data?
Currently we don't support the MLS geosubmit API, simple because we don't have our own database and we don't want to mix contributed data with our commercial database - as we already plan for the license of our commercial database to eventually end. As I mentioned above, this will happen once there is a proper alternative and we are keeping an eye on https://beacondb.net/ and similar services.
Our plan is to add support for the geosubmit API in a fashion, where we batch submitted data (e.g. of a full day or hour, depending on the number of contributors) and then forward it to BeaconDB and similar services, so we can contribute to those services setting up a database, completely independent of us. Once this was to happen, we will publish details about this and the services we forward the submissions to on our website.
Should you be sharing this information publicly on the internet, we ask you to attach a full copy of this email both for transparency and to ensure no relevant information was left out. Thanks for your understanding.