Personal Privacy of Program Participants
Your privacy matters to BIP! From this page, you can explore how BIP handles your data and personal privacy. Please remember that BIP conducts many data collection programs. BIP’s policies are generalized to apply to all programs. No matter which programs in which you participate, your personal privacy matters.
The Bee Informed Partnership, Inc. goes to great lengths to not unilaterally release any information that could identify individual’s personal information who participate in BIP’s programs. Information BIP considers personal identifiers includes name, address, email, phone number, and the location of apiaries. In certain cases, a combination of variables can also be used to identify participants (e.g., number of colonies managed and state), in which case, the combination of variables is also restricted from being released at individual levels. BIP may offer participants the ability to share their own data by for example optionally displaying their apiary location on a map. You are also free to obfuscate the location of your apiary by setting it at a nearby landmark.
BIP does create publicly available aggregate views of the data to broaden understanding of trends in bee health. During the development of these aggregate views, much attention is given to protect your privacy. For example, in our colony loss survey, which aims to estimate how many colonies are lost each year, BIP does not release state level loss numbers in states with fewer than ten (10) responses.
Tech Team sampling for commercial beekeepers is conducted by our trained consultants in regionally specific areas. The identity of our participants (and their contact information) is kept private, unless the participant authorizes us specifically to share his information for a particular purpose (e.g., scientific collaboration with a separate research team). Aggregate views are generated and distributed to participants in the program. These again do not identify individuals but use strategies such as reporting results averaged by month or state instead of the actual sample date or county. For programs available to smaller, and therefore more numerous beekeepers as in the Sentinel Apiary Program, BIP may provide averages for an apiary, but generalize the location to the county level and use an apiary ID generated to be unrecognizable as an individual.
For more technical details on how BIP protects your data, please see the Data Management Plan and the End User License Agreement (EULA).
GOVERNANCE AND POLICIES
- Governance and Policies Homepage
- Our Board
- Data Privacy
- Data Management Plan
- EULA (End User License Agreement)
We are a non-profit 501 (c) (3) organization governed by a Board of Directors that represents a mix of commercial beekeepers, top beekeeping scientists and epidemiologists, and business professionals.
If you’d like to help us improve help honey bee health please consider sending a donation through our Donation Page.
