Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports • Hacker News Board

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#31

Post by mcny » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 8:55 AM UTC

squiggleblaz wrote: post #15

heurifk wrote: post #11

I'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.

Google doesn’t have armies or overzealous attorney generals (and lackeys) willing to ruin lives for their stupid conviction rate. I wouldn’t have believed police officers lie on a ticket if it hadn’t happened to me.

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#32

Post by currycurry16 » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 9:05 AM UTC

moonchild wrote: post #12

Is this data available in structured format anywhere, or do you have to scrape the pdfs?

Let's collect the data in a machine readable form together!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HYTBDsbGeTHY664DNDJ-...

EDIT: Can someone make a map out of the data? (It might not be comparable, but still)

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#33

Post by tcd » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 9:07 AM UTC

mcny wrote: post #31

squiggleblaz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Google has enough power to fuck with your life and no oversight whatsoever.

Google doesn’t have armies or overzealous attorney generals (and lackeys) willing to ruin lives for their stupid conviction rate. I wouldn’t have believed police officers lie on a ticket if it hadn’t happened to me.

No, instead they have armies of overzealous AI bots making decisions without any human oversight.

That's far more scary to me, but you know, you do you.

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#34

Post by adrian_mrd » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 9:14 AM UTC

fxj wrote: post #25

Why PDF? There is nothing in the reports that could not be done with html.

From The Verge’s report [1] “Google said that it chose PDFs over web pages because they could be more easily downloaded and shared with workers in the field.”

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/3/21206318/google-location-d...

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#35

Post by sheldoneth » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 9:15 AM UTC

newsbinator wrote: post #21

Here's the one for the country where I live, Belarus: https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-03-29_BY_Mobil... Notice anything unexpected?

I'm curious, does that look accurate to you? Do you know why it jumped by 41% for parks?

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#36

Post by planb » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 9:19 AM UTC

sheldoneth wrote: post #35

newsbinator wrote: post #21

Here's the one for the country where I live, Belarus: https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-03-29_BY_Mobil... Notice anything unexpected?

I'm curious, does that look accurate to you? Do you know why it jumped by 41% for parks?

Weather. In the German data, you can see the days with lots of sunshine.

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#37

Post by nroets » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 9:27 AM UTC

Some of the models assume the effect of a lockdown was immediate.[1] The reality is that retail declined before the lockdown.

So this data will help tremendously. It even shows the panic buying buying before the lockdown in South Africa.

[1]: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#38

Post by twic » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 9:32 AM UTC

rbinv wrote: post #3

With all this data, I've always wondered why there isn't some sort of internal "hedge fund" at Google.

A theory i have heard from someone in the hedge fund industry is that this use of "alternative data" is mostly marketing. Investors go to hedge funds for their genius high-alpha proprietary strategies. If you can honestly say that you are feeding tracking of honeybee movements into your model, that makes you seem like far-out geniuses with loads of alpha, so you will attract more investors. For a hedge fund, attracting investors is more important than actually doing good trades.

Of course, nobody will say this out loud.

This is not to say there are not some genuine users of alt data. Of course there are! But it's not happening at the scale that everyone wants to believe.

This is a very similar story to the whole "big data" thing in Main Street businesses.

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#39

Post by sschueller » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 9:33 AM UTC

heurifk wrote: post #11

I'm ok with Google having this data. I'm not ok with governments having it.

I'm not ok with Google or anyone having this data as I can't realistically or easily opt out or remove my data.

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#40

Post by sschueller » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 9:35 AM UTC

heurifk wrote: post #11

I'm ok with Google having this data. I'm not ok with governments having it.

Governments can just ask for it and Google has to give it to them. [1][2] In fact the US Government has decided it is easier to have the service providers collect data for them and then just get it when needed instead of them separately trying to "archive" data.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archive/ll/highlights.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...