At SignOnSite, we firmly believe that you should always be in control of your privacy.
How SignOnSite uses Location
The mechanism that the SignOnSite app uses to sign you on and off site automatically was designed with your privacy front of mind. All the power remains with you and your phone, with the phone simply telling SignOnSite when it is on site, or when it is off site.
The way this works is your phone uses its own sensors, a combination of mobile reception towers, nearby WiFi, and GPS, to determine when you have entered and exited sites. The key point here is the phone determines this. Our servers do not help the phones in any way and have no communication with them during this process.
Only once the phone has decided that you are on site, will it send a message to the SignOnSite servers saying that you should be signed on. In this instance, we have the location that the phone thinks it was at when it determined that you should be signed on.
This process is repeated when you are signing off site. Your phone performs all of the calculations with no communication with our server until it decides that you are definitely no longer on site. In this case, the phone does not tell us where you were when it said that you should be signed off.
Aside from these two scenarios, the phones never send SignOnSite any information on where you are. When you are on site, we have no other information aside from that you are signed onto the site. When you are off site, we have no way of telling where you are at all.
How your phone manages location data
In addition to these design choices, the way Google and Apple's location managers work with not just SignOnSite, but all apps enable you to be in control of what apps can access your location.
Your phone's location at all times is managed through the phone's Location Manager. In order for an app to access your phone's location, it must request permission. When this happens, you will be presented with an option to allow or deny this, in the form of a popup like in the screenshot below.
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From that point, your phone will display a GPS symbol at the top of your phone's screen whenever an app accesses your location.
This symbol will show whenever SignOnSite accesses your device's location to determine if you have arrived at or left the site.
These design choices were made because before anything else, SignOnSite cares about your safety.
The reason we want to know if you are on site is so then we can provide our safety measures. We can deliver you critical site information through the briefings. We can help Safety Manager monitor your fatigue to ensure you work under fair conditions. Finally, in the case of an emergency, we can notify you all immediately, far more efficiently than was previously possible.
At the end of the day, SignOnSite is about ensuring that you get home to your family.
For more information on our privacy policy and what it means for you as our user, please visit https://www.signonsite.com.au/en-au/privacy
If you want to learn about how you can manage location permissions on your device and keep your privacy in your hands, check out our article for iPhones, or our article for Android devices.