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I& #39;m going to give my take on those fascinating Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports. A thread.
My PhD was on locative media and I research location for the @ReaLsMsRISE Marie Curie project. I& #39;m literally an expert. 1/7 https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/">https://www.google.com/covid19/m...
My PhD was on locative media and I research location for the @ReaLsMsRISE Marie Curie project. I& #39;m literally an expert. 1/7 https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/">https://www.google.com/covid19/m...
These are fascinating documents - all 182 of them - compiled from extensive individual tracking, on an almost unimaginable scale, that is almost entirely unregulated. This is the Stasi& #39;s wet dream 2/7
The takeaway is that, to paraphrase Eric Schmidt, Google know where you are, where you& #39;ve been and can more or less predict where you& #39;re going to be in the future. The creepy line has been left far, far behind. But it& #39;s all been anonymised so privacy is preserved, no? 3/7
Well not so much, anonymous location data doesn& #39;t exist, location is far too individual to mask. Research has shown that even 4 spatio-temporal data points can uniquely identify 95% of people. Even fingerprints need 12 points for an identification 4/7 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01376">https://www.nature.com/articles/...
This anonymous location data is the same data in Google& #39;s Sensorvault database that& #39;s commonly used by US police in dragnet location searches, and research has found that Google still track you with location history disabled 5/7 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/13/us/google-location-tracking-police.html">https://www.nytimes.com/interacti...
But none of this is new. But what is interesting is that Google have decided to show their hand in a way we& #39;ve never seen before. These reports, while staggering, are still too general to be much use for public health. This is pure PR, but why now? 6/7
