Location Analytics Take Centre Stage with Covid-19

Governments in many countries are using or examining the use of location intelligence from mobile phones to track the spread of Coronavirus and the behaviour of their populations - leading some to worry about privacy; while private data from mobile analyst OnAudience compares the willingness of Poles, Italians and Brits to curtail their movements.

The Washington Post reports that the US government and health experts are in talks with tech companies including Facebook and Google on how to use ('aggregated, anonymized') location data to help battle the pandemic (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/17/white-house-location-data-coronavirus ). Results could be used to help bodies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) build up a picture of events.

Meanwhile according to mediapost.com mobile carriers are already sharing data with the health authorities in Italy, Germany and Austria, attempting to combine the region's keen focus on individual privacy with analysis of whether people are complying with curbs on movement, especially in 'hot zones' where COVID-19 is already prominent. Health 'czar' Lothar Wieler, quoted on mediapost, says data from Deutsche Telekom offers insights into whether people are complying, adding: 'If people remain as mobile as they were until a week ago, it will be difficult to contain the virus'. Wieler says Germany - this far with easily the lowest mortality rate of the major economies - is entering the epidemic's exponential phase, and 'without progress in reducing person-to-person contacts, as many as 10 million people could be infected in two or three months'. In Italy, mobile carriers Telecom Italia, Vodafone and WindTre have offered the government aggregated data to monitor movements, and in the worst-hit (by far) Lombardy region the data shows movements exceeding 300-500 meters are down by around 60% since Feb. 21st. Austrian mobile phone leader A1 Telekom Austria Group is sharing results from a motion analysis application developed by Invenium, a spin-off from the Graz University of Technology which it says is compliant with GDPR.

However, privacy groups are worried about the tracking across Europe - even if it justified now, they expect governments to be tempted not to wind it down once the outbreak is contained, according to www.euobserver.com . Andrea Jelinek, Head of the EU's data protection board, has underlines that extra processing of personal data by governments - specifically allowed in such circumstances under GDPR - should be a temporary measure, and should always use anonymised data or seek consent. The site suggests that 'some practices and proposals floated among EU states appear to be already pushing the boundaries of what is legal', citing the Polish government's 'Home Quarantine' application which it says requires people in isolation to take geo-located selfies of themselves within 20 minutes of receiving a notification - if they fail, police can be sent to their home.

Meanwhile big data firm OnAudience has released research into the movement of people in three nations over three recent weeks - Italy, Britain and Poland. Charts use an 'activity indicator' to show the average distance made by a statistical resident of a given country. The red line is a 'control' week, the one before the outbreak, and the blue line shows trends over the next three weeks. Results show fairly clearly (see charts below article) why British PM Boris Johnson has announced a drastic stepping up of the 'lockdown' process tonight - the firm notes that 'The chart clearly shows that the British have not given up their social life in any way, and their functioning has not changed significantly'. The charts also suggest that despite the extremis in which Italy finds itself, Poland is leading the way in changing behaviour. Results are based on 394 million devices analyzed across the three countries (well over twice the total population of c.166m); data was collected between 24th February and 15th March 2020 and was standardized to allow the comparison of individual markets.

Analytics and big data marketing specialist OnAudience.com is part of Central Europe's Cloud Technologies Group, with a web site at www.onaudience.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.