Celebrate Data Privacy Day to Raise Awareness and Promote Privacy and Data Protection Best Practices

Data Privacy Day is observed in the United States, Canada, Nigeria, Israel and 47 European countries on January 28th annually. The day was initiated by the Council of Europe to be first held in 2007 as the European Data Protection Day. The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to raise awareness and promote privacy and data protection best practices. *Wikipedia

In 2022, The Rise of Privacy Tech (TROPT) expanded Data Privacy Day celebrations into Data Privacy Week, kicking off the week with TROPT Data Privacy Week 2022, followed by a live TROPT Webcast Data Privacy Day broadcast, and a TROPT Innovators networking social. Similarly, the National Cybersecurity Alliance expanded their Data Privacy Day campaign into Data Privacy Week, a week-long initiative between January 24 and 28 this year.

Media coverage sheds light on the need to educate businesses and consumers about individual control over personally identifiable data and compliance with privacy laws and regulations. On Monday, The Washington Post reported lawsuits filed in the District of Columbia, Texas, Washington and Indiana, that allege that Google deceived its users about how it profits from their location data.

Exposing our personally identifiable data is one thing, making profits on our data on top of that is another thing. Existing maps continuously take advantage of our private data to improve their own maps without paying us. Hivemapper challenges the status quo by rewarding its contributors with cash in certain geographic regions.

Data privacy and anonymity of map contributors and consumers is at the core of Hivemapper’s mission. To protect the identity of its contributors, Hivemapper generates three-word usernames.

For example, Hivemapper’s top three contributors in January are:

Hivemapper further protects the identity of its contributors by using computer vision algorithms to blur out license plates and faces.

Additionally, Hivemapper does not attach location data to a username. This means that there is no way to see that the user “Pumping Grey Shoveler” contributed at a precise location.

Hivemapper discards original content. If a contributor accidentally recorded something they did not intend to record, the original data is deleted.

Unlike other systems that collect user data without users knowing about it, Hivemapper is transparent about the data contributors are collecting.

Blockchain technology facilitates a new level of encryption, privacy, and anonymity. We’ve been hard at work designing the Hivemapper blockchain and its native cryptocurrency token Honey (HONY) to incentivize and grow the Hivemapper Network in a completely new way.

Next month, we will publish a document that outlines the tokenomics of Honey, the burn and mint system with a net emissions model, and how the system will incentivize map coverage, freshness, and quality.

If you’d like to receive this document, please email [email protected] with the subject line “How the Hivemapper Blockchain Works.”