Empowering governments and individuals with data to help #flattenthecurve

When it comes to slowing the spread of COVID-19, social distancing is the main strategy being utilized across the globe. Yet to date public health officials have had few resources to measure its adoption and, in turn, adjust their strategies to further combat the pandemic. To help, last week we launched an early release of our COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports covering more than 130 countries and regions. We’ve been pleased that leaders around the world – from the United Kingdom, to Brazil, to New Zealand – are already using the new reports. Today we’ll begin publishing these reports on a regular basis. You can download the latest insights at google.com/covid19/mobility. 

Across Google, we’ve mounted a broad response to help address the impacts of COVID-19. As the disease spread, we received many requests to help respond to the crisis and knew we had to balance urgent public health needs while protecting the privacy of our users and adhering to our stringent privacy protocols and policies.

I’m proud of both how we designed the reports and made them available to the community at large. First, the reports are created on aggregated, anonymized data from users who have turned on the Location History setting, which is off by default, and processed with differential privacy so that no personally identifiable information, like an individual’s location history, contacts or movement, is ever made available. Second, we felt strongly that we could empower individuals and increase their trust in public health guidance by releasing these reports publicly. We hope this transparency will help public health officials and individuals work together to strengthen social distancing. 

For instance, officials can understand changes in essential trips and shape recommendations on business hours, delivery options or transit needs. Those at home can see how much their fellow citizens are restricting their activities since social distancing measures were put in place, hopefully reinforcing a sense of unity. High risk communities and others who heavily depend on social distancing to stay safe will be better informed about what’s happening around them.

We’ll continue to gather feedback from public health experts, privacy advocates and others on how best to support public health and communities responding to this pandemic.  Please let me know how you’re using these reports and how we can make them work harder in our shared fight against COVID-19.