Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports

When considered collectively, it is probably fine for an overall picture but it will have some limitations. For example: the people who are not submitting data (whether they found some way to disable it or simply don't use the technology) probably live a sufficiently different lifestyle to render the generalizations meaningless for that population.

When considered individually, it can be disconcerting. The accuracy of location data can be an issue. In urban areas, being off by a few meters can associate a person with one population instead of another. Data classification is another reason. In my area, it is currently a summary offense to enter a park. That can create problems for parks workers. The issue may easily be resolved, but it creates headaches at a time when people have other concerns on their mind. Then there is abnormal device usage. Exactly how do you treat people who leave their phone at home 24/7 because they have no use for it (currently unemployed), do not want to be tracked, or are simply unable to leave their home?

It is easy to argue that these people are professionals who know how to handle data, so limitations will be recognized. That's certainly partially true: governments, police, health officials, and the fine folks at Google are professionals who know how to handle data. The thing is, they typically know how to handle their own data and may not be familiar with handling data from other sources.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HYTBDsbGeTHY664DNDJ-...

EDIT: Can someone make a map out of the data? (It might not be comparable, but still)

[1] https://gitlab.com/pisquared/scrape_google_mobility

What I did find interesting though, is that after the initial lockdown, we show a reliable increase in "parks", that all take a sharp nosedive after it was tightened and we were told recreation should be within 2km of home.

That felt like something of a facebook-furor at the time, but it seems google's data really does back it up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22041205

but it only got a few responses.

However, I don't think that hedge funds are "Googly" products. They fail at the toothbrush test. They require massive capital investments, and while Google has lots of money, is it enough to drive enough revenue growth?

Furthermore, there is the legal danger. With businesses using Google products, Google is likely in possession of insider information on most publicly traded information. E.g. when there is an internal meeting at a company and suddenly everyone is visiting job websites that use Google CDN hosted fonts, or maybe everyone is visiting websites looking for cars to buy or houses. Or think about internal company documents hosted on Google docs or that meeting being conducted over hangouts. How can Google ensure that their products don't accidentially use that insider info? How can they separate the toxic insider info from the okay to use non-insider info? Does that separation already constitute insider information?

Lastly, Google possesses probably more information than most entities in history, and even today I'd put it into the top 10. They also have gigantic capabilities to organize that data, it's in fact the very core purpose of the company. If you possess perfect knowledge how a market will evolve, will someone want to trade stock with you? If you knew how a coin toss would turn out, would people want to make bets with you about the coin toss? Google getting into the hedge fund business might in fact not work because their buy or sell orders alone could change the stock value to a degree where Google doesn't make any money from it. I'm not an expert though, maybe there are mechanisms to counter this effect. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

> Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, once said the company should start a hedge fund because it had so much information. But Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, reportedly responded, “Sergey, among your many ideas, this is the worst,” since the company would face serious legal problems in starting a hedge fund.

> Regardless of Google’s plans, the company is looking for a trader of foreign government bonds, an analyst for Google’s United States government bond portfolio and a portfolio analyst for agency mortgage-backed securities, according to Business Insider.

Of course, nobody will say this out loud.

This is not to say there are not some genuine users of alt data. Of course there are! But it's not happening at the scale that everyone wants to believe.

This is a very similar story to the whole "big data" thing in Main Street businesses.

It's quite remarkable how similar the trajectories are starting from around the 1st death (though of course later trajectories might differ markedly depending on the measures taken now).

The FT has some good charts of this:

https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

It's really more of a qualitative "we have these numbers and they went up/down like this" kind of a report. They don't say what the numbers mean (except some vague sense of being related to "visits and length of stay"). I find it really hard to draw any kind of conclusion from this.

Google make a lot of use of location data. It's used to map traffic in Maps, and is/was/? used to map wifi to improve geolocation. These reports are just another example. And they'd all work just fine with anonymised data.

(I have no proof of any of this, hence over-using the phrase 'strongly suspect'.)

I've found a phone using this. The spouse left the phone on the car: It fell off a bit past where we had stopped. This was on a mountaintop, in the countryside, traveling back from Sweden to Trondheim - not too far from the Swedish border. Location services meant we could head out and look for it. We could see if it was moving (it wasn't, so it likely wasn't stolen) and we were able to use my phone to find his. It was pretty accurate, even in that location. The phone was only a few months old. It had some scratches, but was otherwise fine. (I think the screen is now going out, but he drops his phone regularly at work and the waiting time for a new screen was 5-6 months to get the screen).

But I do understand that it means that governments could track us: Companies obviously are and I shudder to think of a motivated, angry ex or a motivated stalker. Turning the phone off doesn't help, and I don't know how far "turning off tracking" goes since there are ways to get, at least, a general location using tower information. I keep hoping that it'll turn into a greater good sort of thing, but this will only happen if governments change laws to better match people's behaviors so long as they aren't endangering others. I don't think that would happen in the US without major change, but I have hope where I'm at.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/3/21206318/google-location-d...

You can't plot data you don't have ;)

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archive/ll/highlights.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...