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This post is describing https://www.blog.google/technology/health/covid-19-community-mobility-reports/ https://www.blog.google/technology/health/covid-19-commun
by jefftk 7y ago
This post is describing https://www.blog.google/technology/health/covid-19-community-mobility-reports/ https://www.blog.google/technology/health/covid-19-community...
About privacy they say: "For these reports, we use differential privacy, which adds artificial noise to our datasets enabling high quality results without identifying any individual person. The insights are created with aggregated, anonymized sets of data from users who have turned on the Location History setting, which is off by default."
This seems pretty reasonable to me?
(Disclosure: I work for Google)
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoGiven a pattern of movement it's trivially easy to identify an individual by cross referencing with other cheaply/freely available data sets.
- pintxo 7y agoFortunately this is highly aggregated data without individual movements.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoThis is built on the normal Google location tracking systems. We both know that while they may be providing aggregate stats now they have all the data they need to provide individual location stats. Because the capability exists there is the temptation to use it, especially if the situation worsens more than expected.