I'm ok with Google having this data. I'm not ok with governments having it.
Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports
11–20 of 87 posts
Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports
#12Is this data available in structured format anywhere, or do you have to scrape the pdfs?
Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports
#13I'm ok with Google having this data. I'm not ok with governments having it.
Why? At least with government you have theoretical recourse at the polls. With a megacorp you can’t do shit if you don’t like what they’re up to.
Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports
#14With all this data, I've always wondered why there isn't some sort of internal "hedge fund" at Google.
Too much noise. The costs to sift through and find an identifiable market trend that has an actual upside would be very high, and you still don't have a complete picture of the market so you'd be wrong in a lot of scenarios.
Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports
#15I'm ok with Google having this data. I'm not ok with governments having it.
Why? Google has enough power to fuck with your life and no oversight whatsoever.
Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports
#16India's mobility report[1] shows a spike in outside activities just before lockdown. I hope I am wrong but I think we are going to see spike in coronavirus cases just before end of lockdown. Not sure what government will do then. [1]: https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-03-29_IN_Mobil...
I think that spike is just the two normal days between 22nd's curfew and 25's lockdown
Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports
#17With all this data, I've always wondered why there isn't some sort of internal "hedge fund" at Google.
Yeah there are stories of hedge funds buying and then selling cars all over the country to find out the serial numbers so that they can estimate their sale count before the quarterly reports in a german tanks kind of fashion. Having good information is very valuable for hedge funds.
However, I don't think that hedge funds are "Googly" products. They fail at the toothbrush test. They require massive capital investments, and while Google has lots of money, is it enough to drive enough revenue growth?
Furthermore, there is the legal danger. With businesses using Google products, Google is likely in possession of insider information on most publicly traded information. E.g. when there is an internal meeting at a company and suddenly everyone is visiting job websites that use Google CDN hosted fonts, or maybe everyone is visiting websites looking for cars to buy or houses. Or think about internal company documents hosted on Google docs or that meeting being conducted over hangouts. How can Google ensure that their products don't accidentially use that insider info? How can they separate the toxic insider info from the okay to use non-insider info? Does that separation already constitute insider information?
Lastly, Google possesses probably more information than most entities in history, and even today I'd put it into the top 10. They also have gigantic capabilities to organize that data, it's in fact the very core purpose of the company. If you possess perfect knowledge how a market will evolve, will someone want to trade stock with you? If you knew how a coin toss would turn out, would people want to make bets with you about the coin toss? Google getting into the hedge fund business might in fact not work because their buy or sell orders alone could change the stock value to a degree where Google doesn't make any money from it. I'm not an expert though, maybe there are mechanisms to counter this effect. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports
#18Why is China missing?
Perhaps because Google services are blocked in China and Android phones there don't have Play Services with Location History? You can't plot data you don't have ;)
There are millions of people in China with always on VPNs, and they still have a non-insubstantial business in the country.
The thing is, the geographic data there is protected by law, and they don't want an espionage charge.
The same is provably true for a suspicious missing of a few other countries with similar attitudes.
Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports
#19I'm ok with Google having this data. I'm not ok with governments having it.
Why? At least with government you have theoretical recourse at the polls. With a megacorp you can’t do shit if you don’t like what they’re up to.
Right, you can't do shit... except not turn on location history, which as this page says, is off by default.
Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports
#20It would be interesting to be able to compare countries. For example, which countries have responded most to a lockdown and which have not responded at all? The data is already broken down by state so it would be good to see this data on a map of the US.