Occupancy

The John C. Hitt Library uses a technology platform, called Occuspace, to track the occupancy and business of all public areas.

Occuspace was architected with privacy in mind and we are committed to protecting individual identities. The design of Occuspace makes it impossible to track any individual and no Personally Identifiable Information is ever collected and stored in our platform.

How it works

Occuspace sensors scan for bluetooth and WiFi signal activity in an area. Scans pick up laptops, cell phones, wearables, and other connected devices.

Machine learning algorithms are used to estimate the number of people with over 90% accuracy.

Privacy & Security Safeguards

• Occuspace collects zero personally identifiable information (PII) and is fully GDPR and CCPA compliant
• Occuspace sensors have passed security review and penetration tests by a certified, independent third-party security auditing firm
• Occuspace sensors never connect to any devices, and can only passively observe the BLE and WiFi activity in a space being measured
• Occuspace does use a unique identifier for each BLE and WiFi signal being measured. This unique identifier is based on the broadcasted MAC address of each radio
• Modern smartphones, laptops, and other consumer devices randomly rotate the MAC address of the BLE and WiFi radios for consumer protection
• Occuspace further enhances privacy by irreversibly hashing the broadcast MAC addresses into the unique identifiers used in data analysis
• MAC addresses are irreversibly hashed immediately on the sensor itself with the original MAC address value never stored locally or in the cloud
• Hashing is performed with SHA256 and reduced (truncated) in size to make it impossible to reverse
• A daily rotating salt is applied to the hashing process to further obfuscate the unique identifiers
• The sensors only transmit hashed data to the Occuspace cloud
• After hashed data is successfully sent to Occuspace it is permanently deleted from the sensors