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Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

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Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#41

Post by usr1106 »

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?

At least here in Finland you couldn't miss that when going outside. One factor is sunshine. Another probably kids getting unbearable after not having to go to school for many days. Probably also applies to parents working from home. Lot of families taking a walk. They closed natural parks after they got overcrowded.

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#42

Post by silon42 »

adrian_mrd wrote: post #34
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...

We really need EPUB support in browsers/OSs (in a safe way aka no JS extensions).

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#43

Post by usr1106 »

Why would anybody turn on location history? (Serious question, I don't even have Google Play Services in my phone). 95 % users are known not to touch any settings. I guess Google has a trick to make more of them do it. Which one?

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#45

Post by soneil »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #2

Retail & Recreation down 47% and Grocery & Pharmacy down 22% in the United States. Wow, I didn't think it would be such a significant drop.

I'm in Ireland .. Retail & Recreation are down 80-90% in most counties!

What I did find interesting though, is that after the initial lockdown, we show a reliable increase in "parks", that all take a sharp nosedive after it was tightened and we were told recreation should be within 2km of home.

That felt like something of a facebook-furor at the time, but it seems google's data really does back it up.

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#46

Post by bradfa »

I think that Google and Apple will be extremely helpful in the coming months, at least in the USA, for tracing the spread of COVID-19. Google and Apple know where probably 90+% of adults/teens in the USA are located in real time. If they are able to anonymously tell you that you were in the same building as someone who has tested positive for the virus then you could take extra precautions or further isolate yourself to help prevent the spread. This wouldn't be perfect but it would be much more data than is given to people today about who is infected and it would make tracing contacts much easier for health officials.

A small number of people who read sites like Hacker News will find this an appalling invasion of privacy. Health officials will think it's a really useful thing to try. It'll be interesting to watch, if it does happen.

In the near term, I would happily try to convince everyone I meet to opt-in to such a service as I feel the health benefits could greatly outweigh the privacy concerns. But then when we do have a better long term solution for this virus I would also strongly recommend people to disable the tracking.

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#47

Post by baybal2 »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #27
baybal2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're using a VPN, your location won't show up as mainland China.

VPN goes not affect GPS signal as far as I know

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#48

Post by MikusR »

usr1106 wrote: post #43

Why would anybody turn on location history? (Serious question, I don't even have Google Play Services in my phone). 95 % users are known not to touch any settings. I guess Google has a trick to make more of them do it. Which one?

Why wouldn't I? I can see where and when I was, how long I was there. It can give context to notes and photos. It's essentially an extension of memory.

Re: Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

#49

Post by soneil »

usr1106 wrote: post #43

Why would anybody turn on location history? (Serious question, I don't even have Google Play Services in my phone). 95 % users are known not to touch any settings. I guess Google has a trick to make more of them do it. Which one?

I strongly suspect Google has two separate classes of location history. Data which has been anonymised, and data which hasn't. I strongly suspect that your location history always exists, and that "turning location history on" only gives them permission to keep it personally-identifying.

Google make a lot of use of location data. It's used to map traffic in Maps, and is/was/? used to map wifi to improve geolocation. These reports are just another example. And they'd all work just fine with anonymised data.

(I have no proof of any of this, hence over-using the phrase 'strongly suspect'.)

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