
Google Is Tracking People's Movements in Their Communities During Coronavirus - codermobile
https://www.newsweek.com/google-tracking-peoples-movements-their-communities-during-coronavirus-pandemic-1495915
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victords
I think a more fair assessment would be: "Google is tracking people's
movements"

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wccrawford
Yeah, but it's not clickbait-worthy unless it has "corona virus" in the title
these days.

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oefrha
Would have been an even better title if they somehow worked Zoom into the
title.

“Google Is Tracking People's Movements in Their Communities During Coronavirus
although they are mostly working from home using Zoom.”

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jefftk
This post is describing
[https://www.blog.google/technology/health/covid-19-community...](https://www.blog.google/technology/health/covid-19-community-
mobility-reports/)

About privacy they say: "For these reports, we use differential privacy, which
adds artificial noise to our datasets enabling high quality results without
identifying any individual person. The insights are created with aggregated,
anonymized sets of data from users who have turned on the Location History
setting, which is off by default."

This seems pretty reasonable to me?

(Disclosure: I work for Google)

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dsfyu404ed
Given a pattern of movement it's trivially easy to identify an individual by
cross referencing with other cheaply/freely available data sets.

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pintxo
Fortunately this is highly aggregated data without individual movements.

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dsfyu404ed
This is built on the normal Google location tracking systems. We both know
that while they may be providing aggregate stats now they have all the data
they need to provide individual location stats. Because the capability exists
there is the temptation to use it, especially if the situation worsens more
than expected.

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pintxo
This is simply an aggregate (on country level) on how many people (as change
to baseline) have been at what sort of location at what time (with a
granularity of days):

* Retail & recreation

* Grocery & pharmacy

* Parks

* Transit stations

* Workplaces

* Residential

It's quite clear that this can be easily derived from the information they
have in maps.google.com plus phone movements. It's unlikely that this data
presents any privacy concern.

On the other hand it's probably mainly useless with regards to fighting
Covid19. As the data is not detailed enough for such a purpose.

Also I think we should point out that releasing this data in PDF form seems to
be deliberate to prevent anyone else from providing meaningful insights by
adding infographics of their own.

[Edit: Clarification that does not contain number of people but simply
difference to baseline]

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ramboldio
Why is Google not warning people that they have been in contact with
potentially infected individuals? Implementing this would probably be trivial
for them.

It almost feels like breaking some higher contract with society by reserving
that power for advertising and not using it to tackle the pandemic.

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jefftk
How would Google reliably know which people had it, so it could warn people
they'd been near?

(Disclosure: I work for Google)

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ramboldio
They don't go outside anymore and search for "when do I have to go to the
hospital if i have coronavirus". Or you can just report it.

(Disclaimer: I work on an app that tries to do that. Ideally privacy
preserving. And we implemented it using Google Nearby API to detect whether
people are close. But that sends all messages over Google servers and that
would be a deal breaker for us, but the tech itself would be really cool to
have. Let me know if you can help.)

Also Related Work:

Singapore doing this:
[https://www.tracetogether.gov.sg/](https://www.tracetogether.gov.sg/)

This as hardware:
[https://estimote.com/wearable/](https://estimote.com/wearable/)

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ramboldio
(Disclaimer: I work on an app that tries to do that. Ideally privacy
preserving. And we implemented it using Google Nearby API to detect whether
people are close. But that sends all messages over Google servers and that
would be a deal breaker for us, but the tech itself would be really cool to
have. Let me know if you can help.)

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Kye
You can just edit your first post. It's inside the two hour window. All these
addendums-as-posts clutter things up.

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ramboldio
good call

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wprapido
Isn't it what they already do anyway?

