Your organisation has installed CarboneWatch on your computer to estimate the carbon footprint of its use of artificial intelligence. The application measures a volume of exchanges with AI services, never what you write, and your organisation only receives totals. This page says so in plain words.
It estimates the energy used and the carbon emitted by your use of AI services. When you use ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral, Perplexity or a coding assistant, your computer exchanges data with the service's servers. The application recognises the service and measures the exchange: the amount of data on Mac and Linux, the duration of connections on Windows.
The result is shown on your computer, from the icon in the menu bar or the notification area. It is an estimate, not a meter reading.
Some services, such as Gemini or Copilot in Microsoft 365, use the same addresses as email or office tools: only the browser can tell them apart. The browser extension recognises them and hands its readings to the application, on your computer, without sending anything itself.
It reads no content and decrypts no connection. Neither your conversations, nor your documents, nor the pages you visit are read.
It sends neither your computer's name, nor your IP address, nor the list of sites visited.
Totals per day and per service, never a line per person. A service only appears once three machines use it.
No per-machine or per-person view exists, and no setting can create one. When the organisation reads its figures by team, site or role, a group is only named from three machines.
Estimates per hour and per service, with nothing that names you: the estimated energy, the carbon, the estimated number of tokens — the unit of text of AI services — and the type of service. Added to these is technical information: the electricity grid code, the application version, the granularity of the measurement, the days the application ran, a cause code in case of failure, your organisation's key and, if it has planned for one, the team declared for the machine.
Each upload is made under a token drawn at random on your computer and renewed every month: two months cannot be linked. These data are pseudonymised, not anonymous.
You decide. On first launch, the application asks whether you agree to share your estimates with your organisation. Refusing has no consequence: your computer then sends nothing at all.
You can change your mind at any time, in the application's settings.
Under the consent scheme, simply refuse on first launch, or go back on your choice in the application's settings.
In other organisations, the measurement is decided by the organisation to draw up its emissions inventory: the message that came with the installation says so. You can then object on grounds relating to your particular situation: the request is made to the contact named in that message, not in the application. A button in the settings shows, word for word, what your computer sends.
To the person your organisation has appointed: they are named at the end of the message that came with the installation. Questions about the deployment and requests to object go to them.
To understand the tool itself — what it counts, what it does not, what its figure is worth — the pages below are public. The publisher is Agence NuCom; its contact details are in the legal notice (in French).
