Google uses smartphone locations to show people’s movement amid lockdown

NEW DELHI: Google is leveraging its access to users’ location data to publish “community mobility reports” during the covid-19 lockdowns worldwide. The reports are available through a new website and it covers 131 countries now, including India. The company says it’s working on bringing in more countries soon.

“We have heard from public health officials that this same type of aggregated, anonymized data could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat COVID-19,” the company said through a blog post.

Like all its other location tracking activities, Google promises that the data in this endeavour is also anonymised. “No personally identifiable information, such as an individual’s location, contacts or movement, will be made available at any point,” the company stated on the community mobility reports website.