Frequently Asked Questions
Veriplace draws on nearly ten years of experience designing and implementing location-based services, during which we've learned a lot about the location-based services landscape. Some of the most common questions are reproduced below:
Privacy Management
- Who Can Access My Location?
Veriplace will not share your location with any party except those applications and users to whom you've explicitly given authorization. Veriplace respects your privacy and believes your location is yours to control.
Even for authorized parties, your location will never be shared at a greater degree of specificity or at time of day or with a frequency that exceeds your comfort level according to your privacy settings.
If you no longer want an application or user to be permitted to access your location, or you wish to change your privacy settings with respect to when and how your location is accessed, you may change your preferences at any time. Your new preferences will take effect immediately.
- How Long Will You Keep My Location?
Veriplace will not keep your location any longer than you specify. As a default, Veriplace retains location data for seven (7) days; however you may change this duration or explicitly delete your location at any time.
Veriplace may, for statistical purposes, retain aggregate location data in an anonymous format for a longer duration; these data will never contain or reference your identity.
- Will I Receive Location-Based Advertisements?
To keep Veriplace free to the end-user, it is possible that location-aware advertisements will be used to offset operational costs.
However, Veriplace will never use your location for advertising without your permission. Furthermore, Veriplace will never share your location with advertisers without first anonymizing it and reducing its specificity to the minimum level required to provide useful context.
- Why Should I Trust Veriplace with My Location?
The WaveMarket team has launched dozens of Location-Based Services on all of the major North American carriers, in both consumer and enterprise markets. We have experience upholding the exacting privacy, security, and legal requirements of these carriers while offering industry-leading usability. For example, each of our numerous family-finder deployments were throroughly reviewed by carrier security teams before launching.
We believe this experience uniquely qualifies us to handle your location with the sensitivity and discretion it deserves, but you don't have to take our word for it. We designed Veriplace to be completely transparent; nothing happens with your location that you can't control and won't immediately know about.
Location Data Sources
- What Kind Of Location is Supported?
Veriplace supports all sorts of location data sources, including GPS, Cell-Triangulation, Cell Tower, WiFi, and user-entry. Veriplace's platform technology seamlessly integrates with heterogenous location systems.
- What Carriers are Supported?
- Carrier partners will be announced soon.
- What Do I Need to Know About Privacy?
Carriers and other location data providers place restrictions on how location data are stored, distributed, and retained and may additionally require customized notification or authorization mechanisms as part of their legal policies.
Developers that use Veriplace's API will be able to ignore the bulk of these considerations by using Veriplace for location storage; we've already done the heavy-lifting in dealing with these requirements.
Some applications may choose to store for themselves location data obtained from Veriplace. Such applications will generally be required to store location data securely, such that it cannot be immediately associated with personally identifiable user information, and to delete such data immediately once a well-defined time period has elapsed. Likewise, applications that store location data will not generally be allowed to resell or redistribute it.
These and other requirements are defined in detail in our Developers Terms of Service.
Development Process
- How Do I Get Started?
For the time being, leave your contact information with us.
We'll contact you as soon as the Developer SDK is finalized. At that point you'll be able to use the Developer API to location-enable your application.
- What Can I Do with Veriplace?
We can only imagine.
Some of our ideas include location tagging picture-sharing applications, location-enabled games, and localized WAP content. We also think social networks, local search, and mobile advertising are very exciting areas for application development, but we know we can't predict what ideas will take off in the future. Fortunately, don't need to; with Veriplace pretty much any service can be location-enabled.
- What Does This Cost?
Veriplace is free to all end-users.
Veriplace reserves the right to pass on operational costs to our application developer partners and applications utilizing the Developer API may require payment from end-users for specific services, on an opt-in basis, to cover these costs or to subsidize other costs. Of course, end-users are under no obligation to opt-in to such services.
- What is OAuth?
OAuth is an open protocol for distributed authorization. It lets you give me the right to do something through a web interface without my having to know your access credentials. Read more.
- What is OpenID?
OpenID is an open protocol for distributed authentication. It lets you login to my site using credentials you already have with another site you trust. Several major portal companies, including AOL and Yahoo!, currently support OpenID and many other big names, including Google, Microsoft, IBM, and VeriSign have endorse OpenID and plan to support it in the future.
- What Development Platforms are Supported?
Veriplace uses REST-based HTTP-centric APIs and emphasizes open-source protocols for security.
There are HTTP, OpenID, and OAuth libraries available for every major development platform, including PHP, Ruby, Python, and Java. As such, developers can use whatever platform makes the most sense to them.
- Is the Developer API Free?
To ensure that development against Veriplace is as easy as possible and can be used in ways we haven't thought of yet, the concepts and reference code for the Developer API are freely distributed. However, we retain all rights to the Veriplace name, logo, and to our privacy management implementation.
All source code that we distribute as part of the Developer API are released under the Apache 2.0 License. Note, however, that use of the API with certain location data sources may require separate agreements and may be subject to charges as required by those data sources or by Veriplace.