Google Is Tracking People's Movements in Their Communities During Coronavirus

I think a more fair assessment would be: "Google is tracking people's movements"

This post is describing <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blog.google&#x2F;technology&#x2F;health&#x2F;covid-19-community-mobility-reports&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blog.google&#x2F;technology&#x2F;health&#x2F;covid-19-community...</a><p>About privacy they say: &quot;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.&quot;<p>This seems pretty reasonable to me?<p>(Disclosure: I work for Google)

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):<p>* Retail &amp; recreation<p>* Grocery &amp; pharmacy<p>* Parks<p>* Transit stations<p>* Workplaces<p>* Residential<p>It&#x27;s quite clear that this can be easily derived from the information they have in maps.google.com plus phone movements. It&#x27;s unlikely that this data presents any privacy concern.<p>On the other hand it&#x27;s probably mainly useless with regards to fighting Covid19. As the data is not detailed enough for such a purpose.<p>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.<p>[Edit: Clarification that does not contain number of people but simply difference to baseline]

Why is Google not warning people that they have been in contact with potentially infected individuals? Implementing this would probably be trivial for them.<p>It almost feels like breaking some higher contract with society by reserving that power for advertising and not using it to tackle the pandemic.

Isn&#x27;t it what they already do anyway?