Customer protection
We love our customers almost as much as we love technology. We are proud to announce a new 2018 feature for UK Vehicle Data customers, the Client Access API Protection Layer.
CAAP protects the 'Number plate lookup' facility and associated data cost on your website from screen scraping, competitor usage and public abuse. Building
on our API Key protection layer we already have with IP Filtering, oAuth2 and basic level authentication, we want to put our customers in control of their data usage by building CAPP to be
100% configurable by the customer. Using your control panel you can now view usage stats, enable blocking and configure daily rules.
CAAP features
- Defend against screen scraping
- Stop competitor usage & abuse
- Kerb public abuse
- Stops unexpected data bills
Pricing
Free for all our contract and subscription customers. 10% extra for all PAYGO customers.
How do I configure CAAP?
CAAP is setup through your control panel and can be accessed here - UKVD Control Panel - CAAP. By default CAAP is not switched on.
How does it work?
When you send an API request for data to us you include the IP address of the person making the request, i.e your customer or visitor. We then take this IP address and run it through our rules based system
according to the limits that you have setup in your control panel. Some of the predefined rules include:
- Whitelist - The IP address is always allowed data
- Blacklist - The IP address is never allowed data
- Searches per day - Number of VRM lookups allowed by any IP address in one day
Why don't any other VRM Lookup providers offer this?
Some possible reasons that other VRM lookup companies do not offer this.
- 1. VRM Lookup companies charge per lookup. The more they sell, the more they make.
- 2. The resource cost on their own systems. Processing 'rules' on a per request basis is expensive for the compute and database cycles. When you are dealing with millions of DVLA Database requests this can
put a strain on some legacy codebases and systems.