Carbon Commuting Exploring a privacy-preserving architecture for incentivising ‘ greener ’ commuting

We discuss the problem of building an acceptable infrastructure for a large organisation that wishes to measure its employees’ travel-to-work carbon footprint, which requires the gathering of high resolution geolocation data on employees in a privacy-preserving manner. This motivated the construction of a distributed system of personal containers in which individuals record fine-grained location information into a private data-store which they own, and from which they can trade portions of data to the organisation in return for specific benefits. The knowledge gained can then be used to create schemes to encourage behavioural change, with the aim of optimising overall energy use. This is currently a work in progress and we report on the hardware, software and social aspects of piloting this scheme in the University of Cambridge, as well as contrasting it to a traditional centralised model.