Google Uses Location History to Track Community Mobility

As a step to help public health officials make strategic decisions regarding the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Google has appear COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports today.

"We're publishing an early release of our COVID-19 Customs Mobility Reports to provide insights into what has changed in response to work from home, shelter in identify, and other policies aimed at flattening the curve of this pandemic.", wrote the company in a blog mail service.

Google's COVID-19 Community Mobility Report makes use of anonymized location data to estimate movement trends from users who accept turned on Location History. The locations are broadly classified into retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential categories.

The reports volition initially cover 131 countries across the globe. If you lot're interested, y'all may admission the folio here, enter the region you're interested in, and download the data in PDF format.

For instance, according to Google's COVID-19 Community Mobility study for India, the state witnessed a 77% decline in retail & recreation and a 65% decline in grocery & pharmacy. Parks, Transit stations, Workplaces saw a autumn of 57, 71, and 47 per centum respectively.

On the other manus, Residential areas showed a 22 percent increase as you would wait since people are brash to stay home and practise social distancing to contain the spread of coronavirus.

In the written report, Google explicitly mentions it should non be used for medical diagnostic purposes. "This report shouldn't exist used for medical diagnostic, prognostic, or handling purposes. It also isn't intended to be used for guidance on personal travel plans."

Google'south approach to providing community mobility insights is similar to what the company already does with Google Maps to guess how crowded a place would be during a particular fourth dimension of the mean solar day or live traffic info on Google Maps that helps you plan your commute according to the traffic conditions.