SpotMe platform country-specific limitations

At SpotMe, our focus is to bring your event to your audience wherever they may be, and to make it as accessible and inclusive as possible.

There are however some aspects that need to be taken into consideration when organizing, hosting, and attending an event.

1 - Introduction to country-specific limitations

As an introduction, to understand country-specific limitations, the following should be considered while organizing an event:

• Choose your data residency. Find out more
  Event data is always hosted in one of the available regions. This is chosen by the Backstage user at the time of creating the event.
  
  
• Think of where the majority of your remote audience will be located when they join the event virtually (if applicable).
  
  
• Think of the physical location of your in-person event (if applicable).
  
  
• Know your corporate IT restrictions, policies and regulations. Find out more
  
  
• Know the legal requirements: organizations and entities within organizations can be subject to legal and regulatory requirements that may vary depending on your jurisdiction. Find out more

With the above in mind, you can read on to learn more about any potential technical and legal limitations per country.

2 - Technical limitations

Below is a breakdown of any known limitations per country when using the SpotMe platform.

The table encompasses when a person (Backstage user, app user or live session speaker), is physically located within a country, and is using Backstage, the web app, the mobile app.

* Vonage, our platform vendor for P2P, reported the following (as of June 9, 2023):
The Vonage team continues to actively work with the United Arab Emirates' telecom regulatory authority to restore access to Vonage Video APIs in the country. According to the latest update, the return of regular service will take longer than previously expected.

**Read more about legal limitations.

Note: As some of these restrictions are at a government level that have been put in place on the internet, there isn't anything we can do to address these types of situations.

Important: As a standard quality assurance step, we recommend that you always test the entire platform prior to launch, for all user types. Please pay special attention to the functionalities listed in the above table, if you have users accessing the platform from these countries.

3 - Legal limitations

The SpotMe US entity (SpotMe Inc.) is subject to US economic sanction laws (OFAC).

Economic sanctions are commercial and financial penalties that are applied by one or more countries against a targeted self-governing state, group, or individual. These sanctions are not necessarily imposed due to economic circumstances, and can instead be imposed for a variety of political, military, and social reasons.

As a result of US economic sanction laws (OFAC), events cannot be hosted on behalf of US entities for the following countries:

• Cuba
• Iran (Islamic Republic of)
• Democratic People's Republic of Korea
• Russian Federation
• Sudan
• Syrian Arab Republic
• Belarus

SpotMe and our customers’ business operations are subject to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). More information on GDPR at SpotMe can be found at https://spotme.com/blog/gdpr/.

Some countries, such as China, are subject to local regulations, such as PIPL.

For the best user experience, we recommend hosting events for China participants in our Singapore data center. With regards to PIPL, we recommend the usage of consent for all participants from China, including the transparent usage of privacy policies.

If you plan to run events for China on behalf of a US entity, please reach out to us for more details/information.

Please note that from a technical perspective, events can be hosted in all the above-mentioned countries. More information on running events in these countries.