NREL OpenPATH Privacy Policy/Terms of Use
This app is part of the NREL OpenPATH platform, which seeks to democratize the collection of individual travel patterns and enable a principled evaluation of incentives for behavior change.
Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Modifying traveler behavior is a key leg of transportation decarbonization. Changes to behavior—whether carpooling, shifting to public and active transportation, or using shared mobility services—can play a key role in reducing the energy intensity of travel. However, evaluating programs that encourage behavior shifts is challenging due to the lack of a comprehensive view of individual travel patterns.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory ("NREL") is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC under Prime Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308. This Privacy Policy applies to the NREL OpenPATH App (the "App") provided by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC. This App is provided solely for the purposes of collecting travel behavior data for programs/studies by public agency and university partners and for research to inform public policy. None of the data collected by the App will never be sold or used for any commercial purposes, including advertising.
IF YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH THE TERMS OF THIS PRIVACY POLICY, PLEASE DELETE THE APP.
Why We Collect This Information
NREL's OpenPATH is an open-source platform for instrumenting human travel behavior. The App collects data from smartphone sensors, processes it into a user-visible travel diary and allows users to tag the trips with semantic user labels. The App and platform are designed to be used by public agencies and researchers who partner with NREL to study travel behavior changes in response to incentives, programs, or infrastructure changes.
You can inspect the data that OpenPATH collects in the background at https://github.com/e-mission/e-mission-data-collection, the analysis pipeline at https://github.com/e-mission/e-mission-server/, and the dashboard metrics at https://github.com/e-mission/em-public-dashboard.
What Information We Collect
The App will never ask for any Personally Identifying Information (PII) such as name, email address, or phone number.
It collects phone sensor data pertaining to your location (including background location), accelerometer, device-generated activity and mode recognition, App usage time, and battery usage. The App will create a "travel diary" based on your background location data to determine your travel patterns and location history.
It will also ask you to periodically annotate these sensed trips with semantic labels, such as the trip mode, purpose, and replaced mode.
It will also request sociodemographic information such as your approximate age, gender, and household type. The sociodemographic factors can be used to understand the influence of lifestyle on travel behavior as well as to generalize the results to a broader population.
How We Associate Information With You
If you are required to track your travel patterns using the App as a condition of participation in a Program:
Program administrators will provide you with a token that you will use to log in to the system. If you forget or lose your token, you may request it by providing your name and/or email address to the program administrator. Please do not contact NREL staff with token retrieval requests because we do not have access to the connection between your name/email and your token. The data that NREL automatically collects (phone sensor data, semidemographic data, etc.) will only be associated with your token.
If you are requested to track your travel patterns using the App to participate in a Study:
A randomly generated token will be generated by the app during onboarding and used for all further communication with the server. Only you know the token that is associated with you. There is no "Forgot password" option, and NREL staff cannot retrieve your token, even if you provide your name or email address. This means that, unless you store your token in a safe place, you will not have access to your prior data if you switch phones or uninstall and reinstall the App.
Who Gets To See the Information
Aggregate metrics derived from the travel patterns will be made available on a public dashboard to provide transparency into the impact of the program. These metrics will focus on information summaries such as counts, distances, and durations and will not display individual travel locations or times.
Real-time detailed travel patterns will only be made available to:
- Program administrators to monitor the study/program, send personalized surveys, or provide recommendations to participants
- OpenPATH developers for debugging.
The data will also be periodically archived in NREL's Transportation Secure Data Center (TSDC) after a delay of 3 to 6 months. It will then be made available for legitimate research through existing, privacy-preserving TSDC operating procedures. Further information on the procedures is available on the website and in this publication and fact sheet.
Your Rights
If you are required to track your travel patterns using the App as a condition of participation in a Program:
If you wish to withdraw from the Program, you should contact the program administrator to discuss termination options. If you wish to stay in the program but not use the app, please contact your program administrator to negotiate an alternative data collection procedure before uninstalling the app. If you uninstall the app without approval from the program administrator, you may not have access to the benefits provided by the program. If you wish to have your existing data destroyed, please contact your program administrator.
If you are requested to track your travel patterns using the App to participate in a Study:
Participation in the Study is completely voluntary. You have the right to decline to participate or to withdraw at any point in the Study without providing notice to NREL or the Study point of contact. If you do not wish to participate in the Study or to discontinue your participation in the Study, please delete the App. If you would like to have your data destroyed, please contact K. Shankari to request deletion. You must include your token in the request for deletion. Because we do not connect your identity with your token, we cannot delete your information without obtaining the token as part of the deletion request. We will then destroy all data associated with that deletion request, both in the online and archived datasets.
Questions
If you have questions about the data collection goals and results, please contact the primary point of contact for the study/program. If you have technical questions about app operation, please contact NREL's K. Shankari.
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