Privacy functionality

Protecting end user privacy is important for ensuring legal compliance, and for making your applications' end users feel respected and protected. Proximi.io platform provides multiple possibilities for taking care of this:

Privacy zones

Privacy zones are areas, where Proximi.io logic stops working. Technically, privacy zones are geofences that have specific rules built-in. As long as the Proximi.io SDK detects that the user is within a privacy zone: 1) their location stops moving on the map; 2) movement along the navigation path stops; 3) no location data is shared with the application (e.g. in location sharing functionality); and 4) their location is not stored in analytics.

Privacy zones are typically added around toilets and staff resting areas, especially in use cases, where the positioning happens at a workplace. Privacy zones are easy to add through the Proximi.io web portal, through the Privacy zones tab. Similarly to geofences, privacy zones can be connected to a specific floor, and they can be both circles or polygon shapes.

Geofence-only positioning

Geofence-only positioning works essentially as the opposite to privacy zones. This setting allows you to specify that you will only locate your users, when they are at the venue. For example, a mall could specify that visitors are only positioned at the shopping centre, and when they leave the parking lot, the positioning stops working.

Geofence-only positioning is a setting for the whole project that can be enabled through the Applications tab. Geofence-only positioning can be found under "Advanced settings". Remember to also add a standard geofence around the venue or venues, where you want the positioning to work. Note that this is a project-wide setting, so the user will be located inside any of the geofences added to the account.

It is possible to utilize privacy zones and geofence-only positioning in the same project. In that case positioning would for example only work at the mall, excluding the toilets.

Turning off positioning

One additional option is to give the user the option to turn the positioning on and off as they prefer. The functionality could be presented as a simple toggle. Refer to the SDK documentation for details on how to realize this.