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Aaron Parecki

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  • Brainstorming "verified" IndieWeb checkins

    October 14, 2016

    Checkins can easily be faked. The Foursquare app does a reasonable job of preventing fake (and accidental fake) checkins, but it's still possible. If checkins weren't posted on Foursquare, but instead were posted on each person's own website, the possibility of fake checkins is much greater. What would it look like to have a way for a venue to know (and republish) checkins that it knows were real?

    The checkin post would need to include some piece of information that could only have been discovered by physically being at the venue.

    What if:

    • The venue has a website that receives Webmentions and supports verified checkins.
    • The venue has a TV screen inside that shows who is checked in there. (It's not that crazy, I promise)

    The venue's TV screen always displays a 4-digit code and instructs people to include that code in their checkin post on their website.

    When someone posts a checkin on their site, they link to the venue URL, so their site sends a Webmention to the venue's website.

    The venue's Webmention receiver then looks at the checkin post, and verifies that the special code is included and that it has not already been used.

    By providing people this code in the physical location, there is no way for someone to know the code unless they were actually there!

    Portland, Oregon
    #checkins #indieweb #foursquare
    Fri, Oct 14, 2016 6:31pm -07:00
    2 replies 1 mention
    • Kevin Marks known.kevinmarks.com/profile/kevinmarks
      There's a race condition for people checking in at once. It would make more sense to tie the unique tokens to something that the venue wants to ration or track, like tables, order numbers or wifi tokens.
      Sat, Oct 15, 2016 8:58pm +00:00
    • Ryan Barrett snarfed.org

      great idea, love it!

      you’d need to tolerate some reuse of codes, due to the overlap of multiple people seeing the same code and taking a bit of time to post it, so it’d maybe be more like “probably verified.” you could definitely find ways to extend it to handle that, but they might complicate the UX too much.

      regardless, fun idea!

      Sat, Oct 15, 2016 10:04am -07:00

    Other Mentions

    • indieweb.org
      checkin
      Sat, Oct 15, 2016 8:18pm -07:00
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Hi, I'm Aaron Parecki, Senior Security Architect at Okta, and co-founder of IndieWebCamp. I maintain oauth.net, write and consult about OAuth, and participate in the OAuth Working Group at the IETF. I also help people learn about video production and livestreaming and dabble in product design.

I've been tracking my location since 2008 and I wrote 100 songs in 100 days. I've spoken at conferences around the world about owning your data, OAuth, quantified self, and explained why R is a vowel. Read more.

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