• Coronavirus: final rush for the app, will play role in 'phase two'

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07 April 2020Facebook's 'Data for Good' program expands and provides new tools for using maps to track population movements, researchers and organizations to deal with the coronavirus emergency, using aggregated data to protect the privacy of people. Among the partners with whom the web giant is collaborating the Harvard School of Public Health in the United States, the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and the University of Pavia in Italy. In Italy the team of Professor Stefano Denicolai, of the University of Pavia, and the Laboratory of Data Science and Complexity of the University of Venice, led by Walter Quattrociocchi, work there. Both are part of the task force appointed by the Italian government to combat the Covid-19 emergency. The task force appointment decree provides for the use of data from the web for the analysis of the socio-economic impact of the contagion but not for the contagion tracking app.

The tools fielded by Facebook are three new types of maps, which help to understand both the movements of people near or far from home and the "social connection index" to hypothesize the spread of the infection and the chances that people in one area come into contact with people from another area. Furthermore, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University's Delphi Research Center, a questionnaire has been developed only for the United States that some users will see appear at the top of their news flow and in which they will have to enter their health status in total anonymity.

"We think Facebook and the technology industry can provide innovative ways to help experts and authorities in this crisis. We don't think these efforts should compromise privacy," explains Steve Satterfield, Facebook's director of privacy and public policy. The initiative put in place by Facebook for a few hours is part of the larger Data for Good project with which for some weeks now it has been sharing this type of data with selected institutes and research groups. In Italy, the analyzes of the universities affiliated to the project have not yet been made public.