Google officially releases location data based report to help organizations fight COVID-19 spread

During the ongoing public health situation, many countries have established lockdowns and advised people to refrain from walking around and to stay home as much as possible to limit the spread of the virus. Now, Google has released reports for 131 countries showing where people are respecting the stay at home practices and where they’re not.

Google’s report is based on anonymous data collected from Google Maps, which can be used to track the public’s movement and determine how it is changing in regards to the coronavirus pandemic.

The report provides graphs and details for several categories: retail and recreation, grocery and pharmacy, parks, transit stations, workplaces and residential areas. The reports will be available for a limited time, for as long as health organizations consider them useful in the fight against the public health crisis.





Additionally, Google states that it is collecting and providing the data while following strict privacy guidelines. The company assures that no personally identifiable information and individual’s location, contacts or movement is going to be disclosed at any given point. The data, collected from the report, is based on aggregated, anonymized info sets from users with Location History turned on, which is off by default, and is going to be updated regularly to provide accurate information.