Google is launching a tool that will publicly track people’s movements amid the coronavirus pandemic, allowing health officials to check whether their communities are abiding by social-distancing measures.
The California-based tech giant says it will publish and regularly update the “community mobility reports,” which are broken down by location and display the change in visits to public places such as grocery stores and parks. The tool, announced by the company late Thursday, uses “aggregated, anonymized sets of data” that Google has collected on users, including through Google Maps.
Google says the reports “were developed to be helpful while adhering to our stringent privacy protocols and protecting people’s privacy.”
“No personally identifiable information, such as an individual’s location, contacts or movement, will be made available at any point,” the company says.
