API access to retrieve geocacher home county

Question

Hello,

our geocaching association is territory restricted (we represent the geocachers of a specific territory, state) this is related to insurances and commercial partnerships.

When people sign in, i'd like to retrieve their basic information, including their rough home location (county, state).

It seems that the geocaching API is now available again to new partners, however this is overkill for what we want to do.

Is there any way to do this? I have tried to POST a request and get the profile HTML to parse but it requires to be logged in and therefore does not work as a server.

Is there a solution to do this?

It is critical for some aspect of the associations that we do not accept geocachers from another county. However, we can't ask for a copy of passport or ID as this would access too much privacy.

Thanks for advices.

Comments

This falls into the category that probably isn't best fixed by technology as the technology doesn't work. There is nothing stopping me temporarily changing my geocaching home coordinates if I wish.

Therefore just use a process as part of your registration process just get the user to declare that they are in fact located within your territory. Along with suitable disclaimers about how a false declaration would invalidate any insurance, and attempting to use discounts with partners based upon a false declaration could be considered fraud.

The only other technical approach that might be possible is to charge a membership fee and require it to be paid with a card registered to an address in the territory (or send them a post card to a home address with an activation code on or something).

Answer 1

This does not seem to be related to the Project-GC at all. I assume contacting Groundspeak should clear things for you, if there is some possibility to ensure this or not.

But since the home coordinates are freely editable by users, I don't think this would give you any confidence about the home county of your user so I would aim for using different method of verifying the users origin.

Comments

It could be related to project-gc as a script here is also possible

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Project-GC has the access to the user home coordinates strictly only for the calculation of the information presented for the user itself. This is a good privacy measurement and probably based on the agreement with Groundspeak. For example, the public statistics do not show any distances from home coordinates, the challenge checkers do not have access to this home coordinates and this information can not be used for creating a challenge cache. Therefore I don't think there is a way you would get an information about where one cacher lives, even on a county level.