Google to the rescue of the public authorities. The company has indeed announced that it will publish from Friday statistics from the location data of its users around the world, to help them assess the effectiveness of measures of social distancing against the coronavirus.
Downloadable on a dedicated site for more than 131 countries including France, these reports must reveal the "general trends of the movements of people over time and by geographical area, in different categories of places such as places of leisure, shops grocery stores, pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces and homes, "said an article on a blog by the American giant.
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Helping public officials make decisions about how to manage the pandemic
"We will display trends over several weeks" in the form of "an increase or decrease in the percentage of visits", and not an absolute number, specifies the article signed by the director of geographic products of Google (including Maps) Jen Fitzpatrick and Google Health chief physician Karen DeSalvo. The most recent information will date "from 48 to 72 hours".
"We hope these reports will help (public health officials) make decisions about how to manage the Covid-19 pandemic. For example, this information could help officials understand the changing trends in essential travel , which could lead them to make new recommendations regarding opening hours or delivery service offerings, "said Google.
Like traffic jam detection or the measurement of traffic on Google Maps, these reports use "aggregated and anonymized" data from Google users who have activated "location history", which can be deleted or interrupted in the settings Account.
"No personally identifiable information"
"To protect the privacy of individuals, no personally identifiable information, such as a person's location, contacts or movements, is made available," writes Google. To prevent any attempt to identify a person in the data set, the company has implemented a statistical technique called "differential confidentiality" which adds "noise" to the raw data while keeping statistics close to reality.
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Various technological projects have been launched around the world to fight the epidemic, in particular the use of location data from telecom operators to predict the spread of the virus and trace the course of sick people, or to mobile applications to alert users to 'they crossed paths with infected people.