Introduction and Purpose
This app is designed to collect information for a research study at the
University of California, Berkeley. The study is being led by
K. Shankari under the
supervision of
Prof. David Culler.
The goal of the study is to understand people's travel behavior and mode usage
as people commute to trip generators. We will use this information to make
recommendations for changes that can reduce emissions.
Benefits
There are no direct benefits to you for enrolling in the study. However, we
will use this information to provide you with a personalized carbon footprint
for travel that can be compared with the average carbon footprint of our users,
and with statewide goals for emission reduction. In addition, we will use the
aggregate data to recommend structural changes and incentives for more energy
efficient transportation.
Procedures
We will automatically track your location and use it to generate a list of
trips that you made, and the route for the trip. We will attempt to
automatically determine the mode (walk/bike/car/train/bus/air) for the trip,
and prompt you for confirmation. You confirm trips directly from your phone -
confirming a trip should take no more than a couple of seconds. Since this is a
long-term, longitudinal study, we will continue to collect data as long as the
apps are installed. In order to withdraw from the study temporarily, you can
turn off data collection in Moves. In order to withdraw permanently, you can
uninstall both the Moves and E-Mission apps.
Risks/Discomforts
As with all research, there is a chance that confidentiality could be
compromised; however, we are taking precautions to minimize this risk as
described below. The biggest complaint that we have had from our beta testers
is the battery drain on the phone. This seems to be a particular concern for
iOS users. The "Battery Saving" mode in Moves (M -> Settings -> Tracking
Priority) seems to help significantly.
Confidentiality
We understand that location data can be sensitive, and we have taken several
precautions related to the security of your data. In particular:
- All communication with our server is encrypted.
- We divide our endpoints into ones that expose personally identifiable
information (PII) (such as your personal carbon footprint) and ones which
expose aggregate information (such as the carbon footprint of UC Berkeley). All
endpoints which expose PII have a "user" field in the request that is used for
authentication.
- We use your gmail ID for authentication in order to avoid the risks
associated with storing passwords. If you wish to remain completely anonymous,
you can create a separate gmail address only for this app.
- The trip data is associated with unique user IDs, not with the gmail addresses. The mapping from the userIDs to the gmail addresses is done through a separate table. The lead researcher (Shankari) is the only person who has access to the database, for both the trip and user access tables. Other researchers will only have access to data from the trip database, exported by the lead researcher, but without the linked gmail addresses.
- The server on which the web app is running is protected by a firewall which only exposes the Secure Shell (SSH) and HTTPS ports - the database cannot be accessed directly from outside the host. The SSH server on the host is configured to only support public key authentication, and the only user with access to the private key for the server is the lead researcher (Shankari).
Note, however, that we integrate with a third party app -
Moves - to collect the data. Moves has its
own policies on data
collection, privacy and storage. At the end of the study, we plan to
destroy the table linking email addresses with the uuids. The trip table
containing user UUIDs along with the list of trips will be retained as a travel
pattern dataset for ongoing research. The travel pattern dataset will be available by
request only, and researchers will be asked to agree that they will publish
only aggregate, non personally identifiable results, and will not re-share the
data with others. It will not be used for marketing or advertising purposes.
Please note that Moves was recently acquired by Facebook, so data collected by
Moves is searchable by Facebook. You do not have to provide your Facebook ID to
use either Moves or E-Mission, so there is no explicit link between the data
collected and your Facebook identity. We communicate with Moves over SSL,
using an access token for authentication.
Compensation
You will not be paid for taking part in this study.
Rights
Participation in research is completely voluntary. You have the
right to decline to participate or to withdraw at any point in this study
without penalty or loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled.
Questions
If you have any questions about this research, please feel free to contact us.
For the quickest response, you can send email to the entire team at
e-mission@lists.eecs.berkeley.edu.
If you want to contact only the lead researcher or the PI, you can use their
profiles above.
If you have any questions about your rights or treatment as a research
participant in this study, please contact the University of California at
Berkeley's Committee for Protection of Human Subjects at 510-642-7461, or
e-mail
subjects@berkeley.edu.
If you agree to take part in the research, please click "I agree" below to
proceed. If you do not wish to take part in the research, please click "I
disagree" below to exit the app. This notice is also available
online in case you need to read it again in the future.