New Google site will help governments monitor user location data to fight coronavirus
04 April, 2020
Google says it'll publish users’ location data around the globe from Friday to permit governments to measure the effectiveness of social distancing measures, earned to stem the COVID-19 pandemic.
The reports on users’ movements in 131 countries will be produced available on a special website and will “chart movement trends after a while by geography”, according to a post on one of Google’s blogs.
Trends will display “a share point increase or reduction in visits” to spots like parks, shops, homes and workplaces, not “the absolute number of visits,” said the post, signed by Jen Fitzpatrick, who leads Google Maps, and the company’s chief health officer Karen DeSalvo.
For example, in France, visits to restaurants, cafes, shopping centres, museums or theme parks have plunged by 88 percent from their normal levels, the info showed.
Local shops primarily saw a jump of 40 percent when confinement measures where announced, before suffering a drop of 72 percent.
Office use is possibly more robust than suspected meanwhile, as the decline because area is a far more modest 56 percent.
“We hope these reports might help support decisions about how exactly exactly to regulate the COVID-19 pandemic,” the Google execs said.
“This information can help officials understand changes in essential trips that may condition tips on business hours or inform delivery service offerings.”
Like the detection of traffic jams or traffic measurement on Google Maps, the brand new reports use “aggregated, anonymised” data from users who've activated their location history.
No “personally identifiable information,” such as an individual’s location, contacts or movements, will be produced available, the post said.
The reports may also hire a statistical technique that adds “artificial noise” to raw data, that makes it harder for users to be identified.
From China to Singapore to Israel, governments have ordered electronic monitoring of their citizens’ movements in order to limit the spread of the virus, which has infected greater million persons and killed over 50,000 worldwide.
In Europe and america, technology organizations have begun sharing “anonymised” smartphone data to better track the outbreak.
Even privacy-loving Germany is considering by utilizing a smartphone app to help manage the spread of the problem.
But activists say authoritarian regimes are employing the coronavirus as a pretext to suppress independent speech and increase surveillance.
In liberal democracies, others fear widespread data harvesting and intrusion could bring lasting injury to privacy and digital rights.
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