Enable positon.xyz backend by default in geoclue
The postmarketOS Core Contributors had a discussion about this in the last team meeting, and we want to gather feedback, finish making a decision, and figure out how to implement it (including who will do it).
Background information
The Mozilla Location Service, which was used to provide geolocation based on towers and wifi addresses (so when there's no GPS) in the FOSS world is now archived. We are therefore left with no alternative geolocation for most of our devices. In consequence, there have been two alternatives developed:
- beaconDB, which is crowdsourcing data, but still does not have good enough coverage. If this service becomes big enough, it will be the default in the future
- positon.xyz, which uses proprietary data, but has some legal and ethical concerns. It is specifically stated in the terms of service that it's expected to not last past end of 2025
The problem
Our questions are: which one to enable, whether we should let users choose, and if so, how. beacondDBe will give worse geolocation results, positon.xyz might raise concerns to many. One proposal the team had was to have a dialog in postmarketos-welcome so that users can be informed, and select one, but that requires quite some work, that we are not able to execute.
Any ideas, thoughts, or volunteers for the implementation are welcomed