Google announced the release of user location data that the company says will help health officials check whether communities are obeying social distancing recommendations and stay-at-home orders.
“As global communities respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increasing emphasis on public health strategies, like social distancing measures, to slow the rate of transmission,” Google said in a blog post on Friday. “In Google Maps, we use aggregated, anonymized data showing how busy certain types of places are — helping identify when a local business tends to be the most crowded. We have heard from public health officials that this same type of aggregated, anonymized data could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat COVID-19.”
Google said the goal of the coronavirus mobility reports is to provide “insights” to government officials during the pandemic.
“Starting today we’re publishing an early release of our COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports to provide insights into what has changed in response to work from home, shelter in place, and other policies aimed at flattening the curve of this pandemic,” the blog post said.
Reports from Google will contain data from two or three days earlier, which will spot trends in how people are behaving in terms of social distancing and will be broken down by country and region, according to CNN.
Google stressed that user privacy will be protected, saying that it will rely on “the same world-class anonymization technology that we use in our products every day.
But as Tech Crunch put it, the explanation of how Google is treating location data and making them public is “fuzzy.”
There are more than 265,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the United States, and 6,700 people have died.
