Push back the taxman — Spot marks the taX defends your wealth with data! As a low power, secure and private location tracker, Spot is the easiest way to keep your money safe from aggressive interstate taxation.
What Spot Does:
Spot uses your phone’s very low power location services to track your daily movements. It encrypts each fix and securely saves it to our cloud. Your accountant/attorney can then download this data as needed to address residency issues raised by state tax examiners.
Spot takes three kinds of fixes:
Venue fix: A location where you tarry for some time, say, your office.
Fingerprint fix: A highly accurate GPS fix authorized by a fingerprint.
Optional Tracking fix: A location determined by cellphone towers.
All three fixes are encrypted with keys you control and are saved in our cloud.
Cryptographic Privacy™:
"This place is full of hackers. Hackers ... hackers everywhere. Everywhere."
— Everyone, The Internet, 2015
You have the keys; you have control.
Systems get hacked. Private data gets misused. Cryptographic Privacy avoids those risks. Our servers only have encrypted data. There is no “God mode,” where an employee can see your travels or sell your data. Hackers can only steal random bits.
Our system, Spot and our servers, work together to certify where your phone traveled every day of the year without us knowing the details. It is a very cool trick enabled by the legally durable mathematics of modern cryptography. Spots Cryptographic Privacy™ implements the strongest privacy protections in the location services industry.
You have the keys; you have control.
Detail About the Fixes:
In order of increasing power consumption, Spot takes three kinds of location fixes: a Venue Fix, a Fingerprint Fix, and an optional Tracking Fix.
Venue fixes have an entry time and a duration. For example, say you were visiting a client’s office for an hour long meeting. Spot would take a fix about 5-15 minutes into the meeting and a second fix roughly 5-15 minutes after you’ve left the office to declare a venue fix of your location, time and duration, perhaps for 67 minutes and 13 seconds. A Venue fix exploits Apple’s location database of both cell towers and Wi-Fi access points. While these are not as precise as GPS measurements, in practice, they are quite good. We believe that these fixes alone are sufficient to handle most tax residency issues.
Consuming a bit more power than the Venue fixes are the optional Tracking fixes. These fixes are calculated when the phone switches cell phone towers. While they typically have an accuracy radius of about a kilometer, they are also, in practice, quite accurate in showing the progress of your day.
A Fingerprint fix, which is taken by running the app and pressing the fingerprint icon in the upper left corner, uses the GPS to record your position with the highest resolution possible. When you need to prove that you have crossed that state line before midnight, the Fingerprint fix is what you want to use. Since its accuracy radius can be as large as 65 meters, more than half a football field long, make sure you are significantly past the state line when you take the fix.
Business Model:
In calendar year 2016 and later, there will be a fee required for backing up your data and providing it to your accountant/attorney.