Calculate your Transportation Emissions from your Location History#
Your location history says a lot about your carbon footprint.#
Google richly documents your life story in the cloud, and along with the many data points Google tracks is your “Location History,” which is basically a GPS trail of where you’ve brought Google Maps. If you have the app installed on your phone, as long as you have Location History set to “on,” this trail might be a continuous line of everywhere you go. Google infers the mode of transportation you took to get there, too.
You can start to see how much value from you, a consumer, they can extract from your data. If you feel like an unpaid Google intern, feel better knowing that you, too, can gain rich insights into your location history.
When you request your data from them, Google will deliver a history of you in a neatly zipped file. You can take this file and head to the Carbon Foot Prince. Carbon Foot Prince is an open-source website that runs calculations on your file completely offline to answer questions like, “how far did I drive in 2020?” and “how much less carbon dioxide did I personally exhaust by staying home during the COVID-19 pandemic?”
Curious? Try it out!
Request your Data#
- Go to Google Takeout
- Choose “Deselect all”
- Reselect “Location History” (scroll or Ctrl/Cmd+F to find it)
- Export the data in JSON format as a 2GB .zip
- Wait a while — you might get the zip file by email/Google Drive, etc. immediately, otherwise it could take a few days.
Import into Carbon Foot Prince#
- Go to carbonfootprince.com
- Click Start (or Learn More, first)
- Import the .zip file — et voilà!
Explore#
Calculate and interrogate how “getting around” warms the planet and how to help make movement more sustainable (and equitable) for everyone.
Let me know if you find it useful! Leave comments here, in the repository, or reach out at contact @ carbonfootprince . com (remove spaces).