How Does PlaceSpeak Verify Your Account?

A PlaceSpeak profile map.

PlaceSpeak is a location-based community consultation platform. We provide a safe and secure environment for you to influence decisions in your community. For the first time, it is possible to genuinely communicate online based on your address.

The key purpose of PlaceSpeak is to connect you with proponents of consultations in your area. By joining PlaceSpeak, you are joining a community of citizen participants and will be notified of other engagements opportunities in your neighbourhood that maybe of interest to you.

Verification

To connect you with topics in your area, we need to verify your account. This verification provides the assurance that participants are real people with a physical connection to the address they provided when registering for their PlaceSpeak account. This gives further assurance to topic proponents that they are hearing from the right people in the relevant areas. Once you are verified, you will be able to connect with other consultation topic of interest to you without having to register again.

To begin, we require that you verify the email address that you use to create your PlaceSpeak account. This is to verify that the email address doesn’t belong to someone else. After you have confirmed your email, you are encouraged to further verify your account and address using the optional verification methods listed below accessed through your PlaceSpeak profile page. We realize that some verification measure may not be available to everybody (i.e people without mobile phones, or location enabled device).

• Mobile phone:  PlaceSpeak sends a SMS message with a unique code to verify your account. This is one way we protect the integrity of our community and combat spam and abuse.

• Home phone:  If you have a landline phone, you can choose to receive an automated phone call from PlaceSpeak that will provided you with a unique code to verify your account.

• Geolocation: When you login from within 100 metres any of your places, PlaceSpeak compares the location information provided by your mobile device or browser (i.e. latitude and longitude) with the address you provided when you registered to verify your address. Your browser may ask permission to track your physical location (see image below).  Please click ’allow once,’ so we can confirm your address.

You will need to grant PlaceSpeak a one-time permission to track your physical location. This data will not be kept once your address is confirmed.

Who Can Verify Using Geolocation

To verify your address using geolocation, PlaceSpeak relies on the location information provided by your mobile device or browser. While this information is available on most current desktop browsers, the process works best on mobile devices. Here is the list of of browsers and devices that we know support geolocation.

PlaceSpeak understand how important privacy is to you. We ask for personal information such as address, email and phone numbers for the sole purpose of verifying the user.  This information is only used by PlaceSpeak to verify your account and location. It is NOT shared with others—including topic proponents. While topic proponents can set the level of verification required to connect with their topic, they do not receive any personal information, just our assurance that this information has been verified by our system.

PlaceSpeak will only use your phone number(s) to send you a verification code and to check that it is not being used on a large number of accounts. They are NOT stored in our databases.

For further information about privacy and verification please read our complete privacy policy.