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I'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'm literally an expert. 1/7 https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
My PhD was on locative media and I research location for the @ReaLsMsRISE Marie Curie project. I'm literally an expert. 1/7 https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
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's wet dream 2/7
The takeaway is that, to paraphrase Eric Schmidt, Google know where you are, where you've been and can more or less predict where you're going to be in the future. The creepy line has been left far, far behind. But it's all been anonymised so privacy is preserved, no? 3/7
Well not so much, anonymous location data doesn'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
This anonymous location data is the same data in Google's Sensorvault database that'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
But none of this is new. But what is interesting is that Google have decided to show their hand in a way we'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
Disaster capitalism. Never let a crisis go to waste. Location is key to surveillance capitalism, Google wants us to trust them with unrestricted access to our location and they'll do anything to convince us. The question is, do you trust Google? (Protip: Don't) 7/7
