IS THIS DATA TRUSTWORTHY?
You always need to know it. This information may help you to dispel your possible doubts in certain situations. At first, however, you may need to read the basic principles.
Spoofing
Despite the fact, that all devices are always able to reply to any request they “hear”, all instantly fabricated responses will be dismissed as unconfirmed. However, someone can create a profile using an image of some other person and, while being around this person, provide a fake data to nearby people. Technically, it’s impossible to block such imitations. Fortunately, there is a way to reveal this kind of falsification and make it practically useless.
The most efficient measure against it is the confirmation word. These words aren’t secret, but the probability to create a profile for some specific one is about the same as the probability to guess a four-digit PIN. So, don’t be shy and ask people to confirm their confirmation words.
Spam
Theoretically, there might also be devices that can try to use Speciface to send ads to your device. In fact, there are not many differences between sending spam and a spoofing attack in terms of protection measures.
One of such measures is the displayed profile’s age. The actual value of profile’s age is always determined by a number of days, passed from the profile creation date. The Speciface application also uses this number to define priority for responses to display or may even filter out some of them sometimes. On the other hand, it inevitably means, that only having a mature profile can guarantee that your response will never be mistakenly marked as junk.
Besides the mentioned, there are other protection measures, which were omitted here. Some of them are explained in the technical details.