UPDATE: EcoSnoop responds – see below.
Now, you can rat on your neighbors, your company, even your friends and family. Thanks to EcoSnoop, there’s an app for that.
This can also be useful for catching those who talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk. This might just backfire on more than a few people. But since the green movement started this Stasi-esque information gathering campaign on “eco-offenders” [their word], that makes it OK to snap photos of green activists too, right? I could see some examples. Bill McKibben leaves lights on after leaving a room? Joe Romm takes his car instead of the bus? Monbiot lets his car idle at a stoplight? Jim Hansen uses electricity generated by coal? William Connolley leaves his computer on after a frenzied all-nighter of Wikipedia editing? Gore uses the elevator to his penthouse suite in SFO rather than take the stairs? Lots of opportunity there.
Now before the usual suspects get up in arms about my satire, let me say that I’m a fan of energy conservation. As many readers know, I walk the walk with my own energy saving measures. In fact just last week I upgraded part of my office to LED lighting, and I’m so impressed with it I’m going to showcase the product here. I’m not, however, going to turn in my neighbor because he left his porch light on one night or forgot to turn off his sprinkler when it rains. Yet you’ll find examples like that on the EcoSnoop web page. [Update: EcoSnoop has now removed those, saying they were “demo images” – see their note below -A]
Here’s what they say about the iPhone app campaign:
EcoSnoop for iPhone is an activism tool that allows green-aware users to assist and encourage corporate green initiatives.
What’s the big deal?
It has been estimated that as much as 30% of the energy consumed in office buildings is wasted.
This suggests a significant opportunity for energy use reduction, cost savings, and the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions through cost-effective energy efficiency opportunities.
To help identify the best opportunities, both from the perspective of the building owner and the utility, it is important to examine how, where, and when energy is used and the savings are likely to occur. (Excerpt taken from the National Action Plan for Energy Efficiency Sector Collaborative on Energy Efficiency Office Building Energy Use Profile)
Q: How can I help using my iPhone?
A: Users locate and report on eco-offenders by submitting pictures and descriptions of blatant abuse and misuse issues.
Q: What happens with my pictures?
A:The EcoSnoop website and iPhone applications are a centralized repository of environmental awareness and a tool for actively promoting energy conservancy and green awareness. By using the EcoSnoop iPhone application, the user becomes an important link in the chain of helping to report and mediate green waste (energy, pollution, etc.). Additionally, by going yourself and encouraging friends to utilize the website to add as much information as possible about the picture (address information, responsible party information, etc.) you are giving the EcoSnoop community the tools to encourage positive change!
EcoSnoop: We need your help saving the world…1 picture at a time.
Online: EcoSnoop.com
Twitter: @EcoSnoop
*An Appency Press Video Promo Reel – www.theappencypress.com*
h/t to WUWT reader Steve Keohane
UPDATE: A response from EcoSnoop who called me personally via telephone. Since their message seems to have missed the mark, I offered to elevate their message here. I believe this to be a sincere and reasonable response, and certainly nobody among us likes to see government or corporations waste energy. But the implementation here invites abuse. They ask for suggestions, let’s offer them some. – Anthony
{Anthony, for a posting to all users}
All,
Thank you for very much for the spirited conversation. We clearly have a lot of work to do to get EcoSnoop tuned into a constructive tool.
EcoSnoop is aimed at helping Government building owners understand when they are wasting energy. Energy efficiency hopefully is a non controversial solution in that it saves money, emissions and enhances national security. Our current policy is to prevent the posting of any information about ones residence. Unfortunately some old demo pictures are on the site, and they will be removed.
Our objective is to educate people on energy waste, not call them out. Our newer version which is still in work masks the location to all but the person who submits and the person who owns the building.
EcoSnoop is an evolving social community. As community, we need to maintain a certain decorum to assure everyone benefits from the “networks” observations to eliminate waste. As such, we ask that everyone follow some basic rules:
•Respect the Views of Others – EcoSnoop is not a political platform. EcoSnoop is about using technology and social networking to help people, companies and communities understand how awareness can eliminate waste, reduced CO2 output, and save money.
•No Personal Attacks – Do not use EcoSnoop to single out and attack people or companies. The best way to help people understand is through better information and cooperation. In taking pictures and making notes on the EcoSnoop site, think about what information will help a person or company understand how energy efficiency and waste reduction can help them improve profitability and community appeal.
•Avoid Mentioning Company Names – It is helpful to identify opportunities and describe ways to improve, but EcoSnoop finds the property owners take action quicker if they are not threatened or attacked. Sometimes when lights are left on at night it might be a simple instance of light night maintenance rather than persistent waste. The EcoSnoop community assumes everyone is well meaning, so given them a chance to take action. If they take no action, assume there is a good reason or work to better educate.
Since we are evolving, we are open to your ideas and suggestions. Please feel free to send your comments to us at snoop@ecosnoop.com.
I would like to report capitalist South Korea to Ecosnoop. Communist North Korea puts them to shame as shown in nighttime satellite imagery:
http://i46.tinypic.com/2ntvez8.jpg
Faithful citizens simply sleep when it’s dark, as is perfectly natural, after their daily ration of rat & roach stew purchased with carbon cash paid directly to their nurturing central government from the finally subdued United States of America, where thanks to Ecosnoop, private citizens and private associations of citizens known as corporations can no longer play at night.
Here in Australia, not sure how many states have it, but I live in Victoria, and they brought in a new privacy law not so long ago, Just tried to find the relevant website, but there is endles pages to choose from, basically all I want to say is, if someone took a photo of me leaving a light on or whatever, I’d be suing for breaching my privacy! to hell with them! Me leaving a light on is in no way the same as Al Gore and his massively oversized house that uses so much power! and am I supposed to turn my alarm clock off at the wall every morning, and then have to reset the time and alarm every night?? like #$@*!
Baa Humbug, have you noticed that the enviro-groups are basically advocating 21st Century sumptuary laws?
There are so many things wrong with this – it is an astonishment it was brought to market at all. And then defended by their mewling note to Mr. Watts.
Eco-SNOOP people – your first clue should be your friggin product name!! And second, (please try to grok this) – turning in your neighbors, businesses and community members for not turning off their lights, soon becomes over-watering their lawn, or air conditioning at night, or using non reflective paint, or playing music too loud, or speaking a foreign tongue, or posting a political message. Your mission is so inhuman as to be beyond pathetic.
I’m sorry, but you people should go BK. Your mission is utterly without socially redeeming value (legal def of porn.) Oh yeah, there is a way to confront waste – democratic legislation. Apparently a concept eco-snoop seeks to destroy.
“ECO-STOOP” to new lows in moral and ethical behavior. And NOT understand it.
Well it is a tough problem. Culture swings between emphasising the individual, and emphasising the group. There’s whole psychology fields about this. Very quick summary: tribes emphasise the group, warlords emphasise the individual, traditional religion (and nation states) emphasise the group, democracy and entrepreneurial progress emphasise the individual, and egalitarian PoMo culture emphasises the group, and so on. Note also the timeline; tribes came before nation states which came before individual entrepreneurial “self made men”, which came before PoMo feminism and diversity and sensitivity.
Part of the reason for the “anger” you see here, isn’t that you’re trying to promote energy efficiency, or that your app is about using the web and mobile computing to allow information to flow and facilitate networks of people to feedback information to those who would find it useful. For sure, your app does that by design, but that is not all that it does.
From an engineering point of view, each person is just a pair of eyes, and all you are doing is allowing everyone to exchange data on what they see. But people are not just data sticks. People have deeply felt values and convictions, and what your app has done is step hard on the toes of a key and deeply held value which, estimates go, is held by about 50% of the people.
From a purely engineering point of view, you’re likely overlooking this. But that’s OK, people tend to have values, they don’t tend to spend hours navel gazing at what their values might be, rather, that comes out in how people react to stuff. Your app has caused such a “reaction”.
Look again at that sequence of cultural stages. The individualistic entrepreneur (think Ayn Rand) was a whole cultural stage that built the industrialised world. There are a few hundred years of progress right in there, by men and women who held that value at their core.
Now more recently—estimates are about 50 years—you have the PoMo egalitarian diversity sensitivity stage of culture, which in philosophy appeared in Foucault, to some extend Derrida, and feminism. It is also pretty strong in what we see as mainstream environmentalism (not the quiet people who just like trees, but the energetic activist kind who turn up to marches and protests). Again, notice on the timeline, the entrepreneur valued individuality—the individual is a shining force of energy and independence of thought and action—but when you get to the next stage, the egalitarian, things have swung back to the group, the collective, back to human bonding, mutuality—the self sacrifices their individual impulses to some extent for the sake of harmonising with the group.
This is all part of theory that’s been used in practice. Actually the guy who is most prominent in this field is an adviser on many issues, from working in Palestine, to advising politicians on global development. He worked in South Africa with groups to try to bring Apartheid to an end by getting all the stakeholders to see eye to eye. I’m also pretty sure parts of the United Nations have this same model, because I notice it when reading between the lines of some of their stuff (talk of “stratified democracy”).
So anyway, your app does something that group minded egalitarian environmentalists will find very appealing, and that may be why you wrote it that way. See, it isn’t just an engineering problem, you may have built it around assumptions and intentions inherent in your own egalitarian values.
But by emphasising “group action”, you have directly contravened a core principle of about 50% of the people, namely all those who believe in personal action, responsibility, and thinking for oneself. If I choose to save energy, I will do it myself, and I don’t need no “witch hunt” coming after me to make me do it, even if that witch hunt is fifty pretty women all turning up to my door, smiling politely, holding signs saying “please turn your lights off”, and speaking very softly. The principle is abhorrent.
On the plus side, despite what many environmentalist commentators would have the public believe, most people do care about the environment, if only for the sake of taking a walk in the woods of having clean water to drink. This is actually entirely the point of making “global warming” a global issue—it affects everyone. But if you turn it into a “community action” thing, you end up sabotaging it. Because the moment you get on your “community action” wagon, all the individualists will spit at you.
So any serious engineering attempt to help distribute useful information about energy conservation, needs to avoid turning off (excuse the pun) both the group-centric-people and the individualistic-centric-people.
Unless you are aiming for just one type and even would enjoy the notoriety of controversy. But really, if you just want to help everyone to save energy, including the 50% who are not group-centric, then your app probably has to drop the whole concept of “snooping” or “surveillance” or “detective” in any sense. Other people are not going to tell me, an individual thinker, what I should be turning off, and using the quiet threat of a “crowd” (however friendly) to pressure me to do so. As you’ve seen from some comments here, you simply drive these people to direct defiance, because that’s the only way to reassert their core principle and value. On Earth Day, those people turn all their lights ON.
Of course, you might decide that the world can’t afford individualists any more—that they are selfish. But whether you like it or not, that cultural stage is a permanent feature of the landscape. See, psychology finds that that stage has to exist, and can’t be gotten rid of. So either you find a way to mutually respect the individualists, and work together for the sake of energy efficiency, or you go the way of extreme environmentalists and start using your app to organise protests at power stations and block coal trains. Because that’s the only people you will end up attracting if your app is successful (IMHO).
Energy efficiency should be something the app helps you to calculate for yourself, and then, if you like, you can hook that into a friends list and share with the friends you choose to show them what you are doing, and what new ideas you’ve discovered, which might inspire your friends. I think that would allow a social aspect without annoying those who would rather do it on their own.
That could also put the emphasis for you as the company on finding the very latest and greatest information to do with all aspects of energy use in the home and in the office. If your app genuinely helped someone to save energy (and bills), then word of mouth recommendations could make your app a success. It becomes more cloud like, in that your efforts are on building a database of useful data, and your app provides a nice interface.
However, that’s probably a mammoth task, so perhaps focus on one area of energy, be it lighting, or whatever, and make it best of class for that. A while ago I bought a green consumer app that was supposed to have reviews and stuff, but it was too varied and I didn’t look at it much, as it was spread too thinly. It needs to be obviously relevant and useful.
But if you choose to stay with the concept of “social activism against wasteful offices (corporations)”, then at least be clear that 50% of people will think you’re a naive idiot, essentially because you’re running against their deep convictions.
I took a quick look look at the ecosnoop.com site. Some of the photos look like the work of of an obsessive-compulsive personality. A photo of a garden that could use more water, a photo of foliage growing in front of an air intake, a photo of a single light left on during the day. Heck, the local lumber store where I live leaves over 50 lights burning, including their front signage even after they are closed. Now that would be something to take note of, and after I spotted that twice, I knew that was one of the reasons why their prices are so high, after all the “store” doesn’t pay the electric bill, the customers do.
When I was a college student, I had a summer job working night shift at a store, and was expected to complete a checklist of things to do after closing. The first item was “Shut off front signage and customer area lighting”. Intermediate on the list was to shut down all electrical equipment (there was a few exceptions). The last item on the list before locking the back door was “Shut off all remaining lights”.
Ecosnoop being used for such minutia as photographing a dry garden, as well as targeting residences is an excess, unless of course its Al Gore’s.
“EcoSnoop is Not Big Brother” that’s on their website, so it must be true. Or maybe it’s just a case of newspeak. I think this guys don’t realize what they are doing to society.
They can’t even give you an working email adress if you hit the mail button on their “About” page:
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.
:
Sorry, I couldn’t find any host named ecosnoo.com. (#5.1.2)
I lived under an opressive reigime of a little old lady and her twitching curtains. Every visitor parked outside the lines, every loud noise, every transgression of the letter of the appartment rules was noted and reported.
Imagine if she had an iPhone and Snoopware!
Isn’t there some irony that EcoWarriors use iPhones and other current technology? Or is that just more of “do what I say”? I could point out the problems of Coltan, bush meat and perpetuating civil wars but that would be just petty compared to snapping the neigbours porch light.
@Craigo “Isn’t there some irony that EcoWarriors use iPhones and other current technology? Or is that just more of “do what I say”? I could point out the problems of Coltan, bush meat and perpetuating civil wars”
Indeed. My own favorite is the Optimum Population Trust, which says that having more than 2 children is “irresponsible”. This means that Sir David Attenborough (2 children) and Jonathan Porritt CBE (2 children) are doing more to reduce the UK’s population down to a recommended 30 million, than I (no children) will ever do. Honestly guys, if it was so important to start an NGO over to save the UK and the planet, could you not also have skipped the kids?
Let’s see…. zero children… how many carbon credits should that be worth?
It is as if the hippies never learnt the lessons from all those gurus in the 70s, the ones that drove around in expensive cars and smoked fat cigars, whilst telling their followers to eat rice and quit their jobs.
Okay, here is my choice for a new name on EcoSnoop;
iDick
The Universe, the MilkyWay, the Solar System, the Earth, don’t have a problem with global warming or global cooling (or anything else for that matter). People do. The Gordian Knot is flesh and bone. Scientific facts, pure reason, good logic, only go so far –and not as far as people with degrees and Noble Prizes like to think– then its a crap game. When things on planet Earth really get dicey, people begin to boil and do all kinds of crazy self-destructive things or Mother Nature steps in and squashes everyone back to goo. Life’s a beach! Whenever you find them, stop and smell the roses.
[snip] Freaking do-gooder liberals really do want to control every aspect of everyone’s life! Why don’t liberal eco- do-gooders go harass Al Gore whose home in Tennessee uses more energy in a month than the average Tennessee house uses in a year? Or why don’t you harass all the idiots who flew to Hopenhagen on their private jets? Or why don’t you harass the Hollywood liberals who have homes the size of a small village with heated pools? But an even better idea would be for you eco-nut liberals to just go away and leave the rest of us alone and mind your own damn business!
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this, but there are potential law suites here. I saw Government buildings mentioned, you can’t just take a picture from inside a government building (or someone who works for the government) because that could violate confidential agreements and laws. You can get jail time and huge fines for violating some of these.
rabidfox (23:34:51) :
Yes indeed
Say, was that a tropical flower in her hair? Was it grown in an energy sucking greenhouse or flown here on a carbon blasting jet?
Hmmmmm…
O. Weinzierl (02:28:10)
ecosnoop is not Big Brother
War is Peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Minitrue (Ministry of truth) was concerned with propogating lies.
Black is white
2+2=5
Everything gets worse before it blows off.
Can’t you submit surfacestations.org results and pictures to ecosnoop?
These examples are eve worse than a lightbulb left on in the kitchen.
And like this EPA building idea a lot … aren’t there more gov buildings and Al Gore’s properties?
However, coming from where these brown shirts and stasi was home, we should not use the backfire approach. Willis E. got it right.
Anthony, congrats for 30 mio … outstanding achievement.
Happy New Year for all contributors and readers.
Another thought, pictures don’t always tell the whole story. Someone could take a picture of my mini van and say I’m driving too big of a car (with three kids under 4 there aren’t too many vehicles to choose from), but I have a 95 Honda Odyssey which has a 4 cylinder, plus is smaller than the newer mini vans, and I get around 22 to 24 mpg in the city (depending on air conditioning), which is a step up from the 18 mpg all the newer vans get. You could also take a picture of someone leaving the lights on in their office hallways, but they may be security lights, and they could be energy efficient bulbs.
Despite what the film says, this app won’t work on the iPod touch simply because even the latest ‘touch doesn’t have a camera.
Many — maybe most — large offices are cleaned after hours. Lights may be cleaning crews in action.
Also some might be interested in looking at “http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/28/government.web.apps/index.html”
to see a similar iPhone app that is being adopted by some large cities for citizen reporting things like pot-holes that the government needs to be fixed.
And by the way, the iPhone can attach locations to the pictures.
Wow, once again I’m flabbergasted. Any effort to make this insidious application more palatable is a huge step in the wrong direction. Obviously, this is a tool for the enemies of privacy and freedom. Tyranny, regardless of its wording or image is still tyranny.
EcoSnoop… I’m afraid that whatever you decide to name this steaming pile of app, it’s still gonna smell really, really bad. Sorry, but maybe the people that are involved in this sort of snoopy behavior should go out and get a job…
Stefan (02:01:23) :
A well considered assessment of the two mind sets: individual/group. What your analysis does not mention is the whole purpose of democratic legislation. If there is heaping waste in government/corporate energy use – why not get with your Congressmen/women and write a bill to contain it?? If lobbyists derail this process, write a ballot initiative and put it to a democratic vote.
Why must any group in a democratic system assume they should become finking Nancy Drews to protect the environment? This is what we pay boatloads of taxes to accomplish – government acting to protect the interests of the people.
Frankly, the notion of this (tip to Mike Bryant) “steaming pile of app” being for real, is doubtful. It has all the earmarks (including eco-stoop defense posts) of the devious divide and conquer mindset. “Let’s create a fictional Hitler Youth iPhone app! That’ll get em at each others’ throats!” Doh!
The depths some info-warriors sink to! Oh well… Happy New Year WUWT!