COVID-19 is terrorizing the world and Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) wants to give its support through these trying times. It makes an unprecedented move of unveiling a series of COVID-19 Community Mobility Maps that will be hugely dependent on the location history of users. It seeks to establish the movement of people to various destinations in the various communities globally.
Social change
Google will give a data presentation and from that, it will be possible to discern the impact of social distancing among people. Reports indicate that the changes sweeping across the globe are immensely changing people’s behaviors from around the globe.
The unveiled reports highlight situations in about 131 countries worldwide and users can get them in the form of downloadable PDFs.The reports are quite elaborate showcasing all that one needs to know about the mobility trends. The categories outstanding categories are Grocery & Pharmacy, Retail & recreation, Transit Stations, Parks, Workplaces, and Residential.
Reports for most of the countries are out, with the United States reports coming in a pretty clear way. Just like in the rest of the countries, the US has some quite detailed PDF reports covering the county to county breakdowns.
Explaining the change
The Chief Health Officer of Google Health Karen DeSalvo and Senior Vice President of Maps Jen Fitzpatrick have explained the move through a blog post. According to them, the public data release will help public health officials in their undertakings. For instance, they will use the data to strike a much better understanding of the efficacy of the local measures set in place.
Google says that it is going to pay a great focus on the anonymity of the aggregated data. It says the move will be important toward ensuring that user data isn’t used in the identification of the movements of any particular persons.
The search giant also has disclosed that the data was collected from users that had turned on their location history settings. It agrees that it has been displaying the increase and the decreases in visits. However, it cites a defense outlining that it hasn’t been sharing an absolute number when it comes to the particular number of visits.
