Google Offers User Location Data to Health Officials Tackling Coronavirus
April 03 2020 - 2:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Rob Copeland
Google will help public health officials use its vast storage of
data to track people's movements amid the coronavirus pandemic, in
what the company called an effort to assist in "unprecedented
times."
The initiative, announced by the company late Thursday, uses a
portion of the information that the search giant has collected on
users, including through Google Maps, to create reports on the
degree to which locales are abiding by social-distancing measures.
The "mobility reports" will be posted publicly and show, for
instance, whether particular localities, states or countries are
seeing more or less people flow into shops, grocery stores,
pharmacies and parks.
The data goes down to the county level in the U.S. Figures will
be presented as percentage changes, rather than precise totals, and
will only apply to broad categories of location types.
Other companies are also providing location data to government
officials, who are scrambling to formulate responses to the
pandemic, but Google controls perhaps the most detailed dossiers on
smartphone and internet users. The company has said it wants to
help stem the coronavirus's spread but also doesn't want to be seen
as infringing on user privacy.
Google's "community COVID-19 mobility reports" will use
anonymized historical data, with a lag of two or three days, and
cover 131 countries, according to a release from the company. The
company says: "Ultimately, understanding not only whether people
are traveling, but also trends in destinations, can help officials
design guidance to protect public health and essential needs of
communities."
Google's release said the company consulted with the World
Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention on the new tool.
The effort is just a fraction of what Google has on tap for the
global pandemic. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the
Alphabet Inc. unit is among companies that have cooperated with a
White House task force looking at controversial technologies such
as individual location tracking to enforce distancing guidelines.
Such technologies that have been effective in some countries are
out of bounds in many democracies because of privacy concerns.
Alphabet's closely held Verily division is also running a
handful of testing sites in Northern California in an unusual
private-public partnership touted by President Trump early last
month. A Verily website screens patients with certain symptoms and
directs them to drive-through testing locations.
Earlier this week, five U.S. senators pressed for more
information on those testing sites, particularly the search giant's
requirement that patients must create or use a Google account to
participate in the program.
Write to Rob Copeland at rob.copeland@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 03, 2020 02:14 ET (06:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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