The trouble with API keys that never expire
A key issued years ago, never rotated, and still valid today is not a convenience. It is a liability nobody has actually looked at in years.
Why privacy by default should be the norm, not a selling point
Privacy gets marketed as a feature more often than it gets built as a default. A product adds a "privacy mode" toggle, or a paid tier that turns off certain kinds of tracking, and calls it a selling point. The framing gives away the underlying design: if privacy is something you can enable, it was something the product shipped without, for everyone who did not go looking for the toggle.
We do not run tracking scripts against visitors to our own site or the sites and apps that call our API, and we do not sell visitor analytics gathered through our service. IP geolocation happens server side, as part of answering the request you actually asked for, not as a side channel collecting behavioral data about the person on the other end of that IP address. There is no toggle for this because there is nothing to turn off. It was never built in the first place.
This distinction matters more in location data than in most other kinds of API, because an IP address or an address lookup is inherently personal information. It can place someone in a city, sometimes a neighborhood. A provider that resolves that information as a side effect of serving a fraud check or a shipping calculation, and then also retains it to build an analytics product to sell to someone else, has quietly turned every customer's traffic into a second revenue stream that customer never agreed to.
Regulatory frameworks like GDPR exist partly because this pattern became common enough to need a legal answer. But we do not think the right response to a privacy question is "what does the regulation technically require." A regulation sets a floor. Building to the floor because it is the minimum you can get away with is a different posture than building without the tracking in the first place because you decided it should not exist in your system regardless of what the floor requires.
There is a practical argument here too, not just a principled one. A company that resolves IP geolocation server side, without a client-side script phoning data back to a third party, has a simpler system to reason about and a smaller surface for something to go wrong with. Fewer places data flows through means fewer places it can leak from, get breached, or get repurposed later by whoever ends up owning that data pipeline.
We are not claiming credit for restraint we consider difficult. Not selling data you collect as a byproduct of a paid service is not a hard engineering problem. It is a business decision, and it is one every location API makes, whether or not it says so on the pricing page. Ours is simple: the request you pay for is the product. The data behind it does not have a second life we did not tell you about.