Last night I was invited to pitch an idea to some people in Europe about the RM1 and our Environmental Sensor Development Kit (eSDK). One of the main questions that came up was my understanding of GDPR and our commitment to data privacy and protection principles.
It’s a great question and one that I want to address so I can point here in future.
I’m on record (from 15:50) at the 2023 Australian Organics Recycling Association’s annual conference saying that we have no interest in anything but helping the customer access and utilise their data in ways that help them.
Despite suggestions that there’s plenty of money in selling ‘aggregated industry data’ along our journey from trainers and advisors in some of the start-up courses we’ve done, we’re not interested. We know our business. We sell a piece of robust hardware that helps the customer collect their data out in the environment for their exclusive use. We sell storage of that data if it’s desired. We sell ongoing hardware device servicing, support and repairs. We sell development expertise for custom sensor integrations with the device. That’s it.
Our device needs a cloud-based receiver by necessity which we offer, however, by building the RM1 from scratch it means it doesn’t have to send to our receiver. The device does not have to touch our servers.
We understand the device down to the lowest levels. I designed the circuit boards and wrote the firmware. This includes writing the AT commands sent to the 4G modem myself. If a client in Europe or anywhere else in the world wants to send data directly to their server without us being in the middle, we can help with that. That’s the spirit of open computing that I’m on about.
This means that while I haven’t read the GDPR line by line, we are in a position to understand it if need be, and will be able to comply.
A few notes on the slide I reference here in the global context:
- Rhino Instruments is a trading name of Sequence Digital Pty Ltd, the incorporated company owned by myself and Raj
- Our Australia-based servers are for our Australian customers, European customers would have servers based on their soil, likewise for other regions
- Our device’s regulatory compliance and testing has been completed for the Australian market and any work outside Australia would need to take that into consideration separately
To get started with the RM1 as an Open Environmental Sensor Development Platform, please have a read of this outline and then get in touch. We’d love to hear what you want to do with our research instrumentation.