BinWars is a game whose dataset is genuinely useful to cities and to anyone who studies litter. The data is only useful if it’s trusted, and it’s only trusted if the people generating it (you) aren’t put at risk in the process. Here’s how we do that.
A pickup is recorded when a player photographs an item, the classifier matches it to a known trash type, and the item is deposited at a registered bin. Photo, classifier confidence, and deposit are all required — no photo, no point.
The public dataset contains item types, deposit timestamps, and coordinates snapped to a coarse ~110-meter grid. The cells are large enough that the data is useful for a city's planning team and small enough that no individual route or routine can be inferred.
Bin locations are physical infrastructure — they're already on the sidewalk. We expose where they are. We do NOT expose who created or owns them in any public surface, ever.
Every photo runs through a vision model to suggest a trash type. The player confirms or overrides. We log every call, rate-limit per user, and dedupe identical images so the system can't be hammered into runaway cost.
Players choose a public handle. The leaderboard, public profiles, and any aggregate published on this site use the handle only. The mapping from handle to a real identity stays behind the auth wall, where it belongs.
If you work for a city sanitation department, a public-interest journalist, or a research lab, write to data@binwars.com. We'll set up a scoped, anonymized export.
If a feature would require any of these, the feature doesn’t ship. Full stop.
For privacy and data questions: privacy@binwars.com. For dataset access: data@binwars.com.