Privacy and GPS-on

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PPPeter
Posts: 13
Joined: 20 Feb 2021 17:02
Country: United Kingdom

Privacy and GPS-on

Post by PPPeter »

I am writing this as I can’t spot anything in Wiki or Forum summarising privacy issues. I have garnered the following from a combination of Wiki articles and some translation of early Swedish language posts in the Forum. Please correct it if I have misunderstood.

There is a privacy issue in using Turf in that when GPS is on you are visible to other players, even if you at home, both on the phone App and on the Turf website map. It is probably best for users to leave the App setting (“Always enable GPS on start-up”) as OFF. It is easy to switch GPS on by tapping the white man at bottom left and switch GPS off by pressing and holding the now-yellow man.
There is a balance between players’ privacy and the fact that part of the game is being able to see other Turfers while out, so that one can change one’s route plan if you are likely to encounter blocked zones. To encourage players to be visible, a GPS-on bonus of 5 seconds in zone takeover time is given if you keep GPS enabled while you are collecting Turf Zones. If you use the default settings GPS is switched off when the Turf app is not in the foreground, so other actions (app notifications, SMS messages etc) all switch off the GPS and you lose the bonus. To avoid this, you need to change the setting “Enable background Turfing” to ON. The default for this is set to OFF to try to make sure only experienced Turfers use it, as newcomers may not realise that leaving Turf running with GPS on while at home advertises their home address.
There was some Forum discussion of privacy zones as implemented by Strava in 2017 (Swedish) and most recently here, but there are no plans to implement them.

If this is correct, perhaps it or something like it should be added to the Quick Guide section of the Wiki?
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DIProgan
Posts: 692
Joined: 21 Aug 2013 08:47
Country: Sweden
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Re: Privacy and GPS-on

Post by DIProgan »

Sounds correct. Not sure about the quickstart part.
Running the third-party project https://turfbridge.com
mattonabike
Posts: 14
Joined: 25 Dec 2020 21:50
Country: United Kingdom

Re: Privacy and GPS-on

Post by mattonabike »

Great point. I had been concerned about the privacy aspect/ home location.
I made the change. Thanks
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