Donate your data to make IoT a force for good

Howard Chong, assistant professor of economics and sustainability at Cornell University and a fellow at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, estimates that Ecobee’s data has saved him more than $1.6 million and allowed him to get information about a much larger population of homes in a wider number of geographic areas than he would have without it. He bases that number on the $200 cost of outfitting a single home with the right kinds of sensor for two weeks. By leveraging Ecobee’s program, he gets data on 8,000 homes over a period of years.

Chong is trying to build a “check engine light” for homes’ energy efficiency. He wants to show people whether their home is leaking more AC or heat than they should. Because homes are built by people, not machines, each contractor may handle elements such as wrapping, insulating, or weatherstripping in different ways, leading to substantial variations in the building’s ability to maintain a comfortable temperature. Using the Ecobee data, Chong has figured out that some homes leak a huge amount of heat or AC. If those leaks were fixed, that energy use could be reduced, saving consumers money and reducing overall consumption.

Chong’s research could let consumers perform a simple test to see how well their homes retain heat or cooling. But Jeff Siegel, a professor of civil and mineral engineering at the University of Toronto, has a bigger goal in mind. He wants to understand how homes are built and how people live in them so he can improve indoor air quality.

Homes have become so well insulated and sealed off from the world that it’s easy to forget how many of their features — and how we behave in them — affect air quality. Sensors and monitoring, he says, give researchers the ability to take all of those fundamentally invisible factors and make them visible to others.

“Air looks like air whether it’s clean or dirty,” Siegel explains. “It’s invisible. IoT starts giving us windows into that invisibility.” I spent an hour talking to Siegel about indoor air quality monitoring, so you can expect a visit from him on the podcast soon. But the tl;dr version of his research is that the best thing you can do to improve your home’s air quality is to buy a high-quality downdraft fan to use when cooking and then actually use it.

His utilization of Ecobee data focused on humidity, and how effectively modern AC units manage to cool the air while also drying it out. New AC units are so efficient they spend less time running than older ones , which means that some homes can be cool but at the same time more humid than they should be. That can promote allergies, but it can also just lead to discomfort.

Each of the researchers were grateful to Ecobee for providing the data, and Siegel says he’s approached other thermostat companies about getting access to their data as well. So far that hasn’t happened. But Ecobee’s data does come with strings.

Ecobee’s Crerar says that researchers who use the data have to be “mission-aligned” with the company’s goals. I asked her twice what those goals were and she gave me different answers each time, but the gist was that researchers have to be looking for ways to improve energy use, building science, and materials, and be trying to use technology to understand what effects our buildings have on our lives.

Presumably if you wanted to use Ecobee’s data to understand how many people leave their homes during the day so you can devise new best practices for telemarketers, the company would say no. As for the data, Crerar says the company worked hard to create a customer-friendly sharing option that keeps personally identifiable information out of researchers’ hands and lets customers opt out of the program.

I asked if users who opt out can request that their data be scrubbed from the program. This is a feature of the newly enacted General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in the EU. However, after talking to the researchers, I didn’t see how such a thing would be possible. And Crerar said that those participating can opt out of any future data collection, but not from having any data they’ve already shared be used.

She says Ecobee tries to explain all of this very transparently in the FAQs associated with the donate-your-data program. During the program’s creation, Ecobee met with about 100 customers to ask for their input. “Good governance over data is a brand-new conversation,” she says. “We built this program and focused on how we would want to be treated and we’re quite eager to continue to make that better.”

This sort of attitude, and the emphasis on promoting research that could benefit others, might be the antidote to the current uproar over massive data collection by helping consumers feel like their data is both valued and that it belongs to them.