Top 3 Use Cases for Verified Location Technology
Technology to verify a user's location is becoming readily available. Here we discuss our top three potential use-cases made possible by the emergence of verified location technology.
Authentication#
Multi-factor authentication has been become synonymous with online banking. If you have made payments using online banking on your phone or on your laptop you most likely had to use a random code that is generated on a separate device, send to your phone by SMS or found in a large lookup table. By adding in these relatively hard to fake security checks the full security system which includes your username and password is exponentially harder to breach. Some highly sensitive systems are protected with up to 4 layers of authentication.
Verified location is a great tool for adding an additional, non-obtruisive layer of authorization. By requiring the user to be within a specific area it becomes very hard to remotely breach the account. Every time your account would be accessed from a location outside of your safety region you would receive an email notifying you of the access attempt. The user is then easily able to prevent malicious access to their account by remote hackers.
Anti-Cheating#
We have all experienced cheating when we were kids, playing games with your friends or family. When one person decides to subtly set the odds in their favor, you typically will not notice, however the moment you find out all your enjoyment of the game is spoiled. Especially now in the time of competitive online games, cheating is becoming increasingly disruptive and visible. Game developers have become quite adept at detecting anomalies within digital behavior of the players, however as new levels of control and interaction within the real world is entering the games it has become harder to prevent cheating.
Especially augmented reality mobile games that rely on the device position for the gameplay are suffering because of location faking. The cheaters are able to fake their device location by using software spoofing or even hardware spoofing. These methods are hard to prevent as they live outside the software of the game. Using verified location could be used to identify cheaters, making for an improved experiences for all legitimate players and increase revenue for the developer of the game.
Proof of Location#
Picking up your passport at the municipality or embassy is something we do without giving it a second thought, however there is a very important reason behind your visit in person. By showing your face you provide proof that you are in fact in the location you say you are. This proof of location is necessary as people are banned from travelling without a passport and this is the best way to control this. Coming to the municipality or embassy has however become very difficult in these times of the COVID pandemic. Many government buildings have very strict policies on making appointments, to prevent unnecessary visits. This has however created very long waiting times.
Being able to prove your location reliably through your smartphone would be a great tool innovate this process. It would be possible to use your phone camera to verify your identity while your location is verified using GNSS measurements.
At Unveiler we're building verified location technology using raw GNSS measurements. By using the signal of location positioning satellites, such as GPS, we can offer our services anywhere in the world. Is your use-case not listed here? Then feel free to reach out to [email protected] and we can explore together if and how Unveiler can help to solve your problems.