Bee keeping is an interesting and seemingly worthwhile hobby, but there are a few ethical issues which pose a threat to the maximum effectiveness of the project. Honey bees are essential to our farming economy and with providing multiple foods available for human consumption. With that said, they are dieing. To combat this, beekeepers on hivetracks.com has a cloud based management tool to help the user keep records for each of their hives. There are several ethical issues already with this system, which for the most part there hasn't been a problem with yet, but can expect to handle in the future. It is not clear who owns and therefore control the data, which is a problem related to both copy-write and privacy. There's also the matter of who owns the software used by hivetracks. It is also not understood by the users how secure their data is. Users know its located on a cloud but not much else if they even know what a cloud is. As of right now, there are many bee hives shown on a Google map, which can be a privacy concern on its own.
beeinformed.org has been suggested to partnering up with hivetracks for better effects in the future. This combination would be very beneficial as beeinformed seems to have an informative data analysis system. By combining two website features into one, you once again see the problem of intellectual property. Who owns data, software, hardware, etc.
hivetracks, in the near future, expects to have an automated hive monitoring system on all its hives consisting of instruments inside/outside the hive. This would be great for getting accurate data and assisting the beekeeper. There are plenty of negative aspects to this. The data automatically entered by the instruments could show neglectfulness by keekeepers among other things. While this tool would be extremely useful, hivetracks would have to set policy and notice once again on who owns data and what can they divulge to the public or the government.
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