These reports, called the COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, will contain trends of movement in terms of visiting places such as groceries, pharmacies, and workplaces. The company says it’ll contain data from the past several weeks up to until the last 48 to 72 hours. [Read: Facebook launches standalone Messenger desktop app] Google said these reports might help public health officials understand people’s habits of making essential trips outside their homes, for things like buying groceries and medicines — and recommend ideal operational hours for businesses accordingly: The search giant said that data is collected from folks who have turned on their location history in Google Maps. It added that data collected for these trends is anonymized and “no personally identifiable information will be made available at any point.” In a separate effort, Facebook is also providing location data to researchers in the US to measure the effectiveness of social distancing efforts. This announcement comes at a time where governments across the world are trying to leverage location data to notify people about close contact with COVID-19 positive patients. Yesterday, India officially released its coronavirus tracker that leverages the phone’s GPS and Bluetooth data. In the US, mobile ad companies are also sharing data with health authorities and state governments. Taiwan, Israel, and Singapore are other examples of governments relying on location data to curb the coronavirus pandemic. You can check out data for your region here.
