Using a smartphone to track and access your carbon footprint

The Smart UK project, backed by UK Trade and Investment (a government body that promotes UK businesses), recently held an event to present its shortlist of companies and products to highlight UK innovations in mobile technologies. This is part of the build up to the mobile telecom industry’s largest event, Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona later in February.

Smart UK attracted dozens of entrants, which had been whittled down to a shortlist of nineteen with an overall winner to be announced during MWC.

Among the entries were technologies aimed at making mobile devices easier to use, ultra low cost tablets and systems for safeguarding mobile networks’ power requirements.

There were also the usual set of ‘mobile will enhance your life’ consumer apps offering mobile extensions to existing consumer concepts or offering new and innovative business models.

However in all fast moving technical marketplaces there are always a few ideas that set off down one path only to discover that there are unexpected consequences, which lead off in another direction entirely.

Carbon Hero’s CarbonDiem is a great example of the above scenario in action. The concept itself is straightforward enough – it uses a mobile device to capture its owner’s movements and calculate their carbon footprint.

The application's aggregation of calculations, of course, goes into quite a bit of detail, such as the mode of transport taken, or the type of car and what speed it travelled at. Being specific allows the application to better calculate your carbon footprint.

It’s an interesting way to measure your carbon emissions when travelling. It’ll also be highly useful for companies and businesses as it will allow them to aggregate employee travel information and access just how much it affects the environment.

However the unexpected consequence is that when all the data is combined, say for a region, city or transport hub, the aggregated information provides something else – it shows exactly where you’ve been, how you got there and where you’re going next. In short: it’s a tad invasive – and quite Orwellian in its potential applications, if we’re honest.

There are benefits, though. For instance, today most of the information collected around public transport in the UK is via surveys. While this can provide statistically valid information, it does rely on the accuracy and memories of travellers. Capturing the precise reality of travel, with accurate timing and volumes of users would provide a wealth of useful information for planning travel resources and reducing congestion and overcrowding headaches. That would have significant benefits for individuals too.

In many respects while individual data points are interesting and can affect personal choices and decision making, the really big benefits and value comes from the combination of masses of information.

In this way both Google and Facebook have huge market value not simply because they can target advertising and services at individuals based on their specific actions, likes or circumstances, but because they have so much aggregated information that they can see large and significant trends. Or at least they could, assuming they have the will and appropriate tools to dissect and analyse the collected information (which they probably do).

Capturing this sort of personal and behavioural information will always be fraught with privacy concerns not only regarding what an information gatherer will do with the data, or with whom they will share it, but also regarding whether it might be lost, stolen or hacked.

A quick glance across the media will show these fears are well founded, no matter how large, powerful or apparently trustworthy the organisation.

CarbonDiem gets round this by exploiting the power of the smartphone and pre-processing the most sensitive information before it leaves the device to be centrally aggregated.

For instance, an application that seeks to report a carbon footprint will calculate journey modes, times and distances on the phone before transmitting them anonymously, without any info that could identify the individual or their device, to a database on a server in the cloud. Once there, it can then safely be shared with interested third parties.

This separation of activities between an end device and the core system is different to most online internet user tracking by retailers, search engines, carriers and social media sites. These typically use ‘cookies’ stored on the personal computer and keep far more data in centralised servers where it can be later processed, mainly for targeted advertising.

Another difference between different forms of online access is that mobile devices are far more personal and context aware than desktop computers. They are carried and used pretty much everywhere and by a very large cross section of users.

The information captured could be used for personal tracking and targeted individual advertising, as in the dark future portrayed in the Tom Cruise film ‘Minority Report’, but there are plenty of more beneficial uses for such data when aggregated – providing personal privacy is suitably protected, that is.

Nonetheless, it is great to see the UK has such a good diversity of mobile innovation being showcased at Mobile World Congress.