New Google Tool Taps Location Data to Measure Effectiveness of Social Distancing

If you lot've opted into Google'southward location tracking feature, your whereabouts are now being fed into a tool to track whether people are staying home during the coronavirus pandemic.

On Friday, Google released the tool to help governments and public health regime measure the effectiveness of social distancing rules and quarantine orders across 131 countries and regions. It'southward public and accessible to anyone on a new website chosen COVID-nineteen Customs Mobility Reports.

The tool collects location data from people's smartphones, which tin can reveal what you're doing throughout the day as well as where you alive. So Google volition not provide an online map showing everyone's movements. Instead, the visitor is offering line graphs, showing the increment or decrease in pes traffic flowing to various segments, including retail shops, groceries, and residential homes.

New York County graph showing the decrease in foot traffic

The data is taken from an existing characteristic in Google Maps, which can show you how busy your favorite restaurant is during the twenty-four hours. The company determines this past processing everyone's anonymized and aggregated location data to effigy out when foot traffic to the restaurant is high or low.

"We have heard from public health officials that this same type of aggregated, anonymized data could exist helpful as they brand critical decisions to combat COVID-nineteen," Google executives Jen Fitzpatrick and Karen DeSalvo wrote in a blog postal service today.

Gif of the tool in action

The new tool will offer mobility information on different countries, US states, and US counties for two to 3 days prior, and compare the stats to a baseline taken before the pandemic started. Viewers can and then encounter how foot traffic to various places has changed during the ongoing crisis.

"While we display a percent point increase or decrease in visits, we do not share the accented number of visits. To protect people'southward privacy, no personally identifiable information, similar an individual's location, contacts or motility, is fabricated available at any point," the Google executives added.

Graph for Los Angeles County

The company hopes the data will help public health government make the right decisions in responding to the coronavirus pandemic as the disease continues to spread beyond the U.s.. "For example, this data could help officials sympathize changes in essential trips that can shape recommendations on business hours or inform delivery service offerings. Similarly, persistent visits to transportation hubs might indicate the need to add additional buses or trains in order to allow people who demand to travel room to spread out for social distancing," the executives said.

To incorporate the pandemic, many governments are increasingly borer location data from smartphones to find out who coronavirus carriers accept come into contact with. However, the strategy has raised alarm bells with privacy advocates over how the same technologies could exist driveling for other surveillance purposes.

According to The Washington Mail service, the Us authorities has also engaged in talks with Google, Facebook, and other technology companies about using the location data to assist contain the coronavirus. However, legal bug and privacy concerns appear to exist stalling the effort.

Google's approach tries to side-footstep potential ethical ramifications by non offer up location data on individual users. Notwithstanding, if you're creeped out by the data collection, yous can opt out by shutting down the location history feature in Google. "Users who have Location History turned on tin can cull to turn the setting off at any time from their Google Account, and tin can always delete Location History data direct from their Timeline," the company added.