Alerter Permissions

Your location
Earthquake Alerter needs your location so it can filter and show notifications for earthquakes near you.

Network communication
Earthquake Alerter needs to register your account with the Alerter server and Google's C2DM server. It also needs to receive cloud to device messages (push notifications).

Your accounts
The Earthquake Alerter server requires a Google account for authentication and registration since it uses Google App Engine as the server. This ensures a secure connection to send your device ID to Google's C2DM servers. That's why you also have to agree to accept the Google App Engine permission.

System tools
When an alert comes in, Earthquake Alerter temporarily wakes up the phone in order to display a notification before going back to sleep. This ensures minimal battery life is used.

Questions

Why do you need my account information?
Because my server uses Google's app engine framework, it requires an authenticated user account for secure connections. It is simply used for securing connections and is not used in any other way. Please email me if you have any questions.

Other apps that have push notifications don't require connecting
Other apps that use C2DM like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, etc. already have your account information when you log in. Therefore, they connect your phone to their server in the background. Plus, they have custom servers that guarantee a secure and authenticated connection. Since I don't have any account information for that secure connection, I need to ask for that permission. This is similar to allowing permission in other apps like Facebook apps.

Why are the alerts arriving 10, 20, 50 minutes after the event?
Please check the main F.A.Q. and disclaimer for detailed explanation of this. The summary is that my source of data (USGS) doesn't post earthquakes until many minutes (up to 1 hour) after the actual event. After that, I attempt to deliver the notification as quick as possible.