How Apple and Google's Social Distancing Maps Work

By David Nield, Wired.com

New tools from the tech giants show the dramatic impact of sheltering in place, using
location data from phones like yours.

YO U' RE P RO B ABLY AW AR E that your phone tracks your location. It's how Google can
suggest which restaurants are nearby, and how Facebook can tag the bar you're in, and how
Apple can tell where you left your iPhone if you lose it. Now Apple and Google are turning that
mass of data into a tool to track just how strictly people are sheltering in place around the
globe during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Apple's version launched a few days ago; Google had a head start by several weeks. They're
both similar in their approach and their aims: Use mapping data gathered from phones to see
how much less people are traveling in response to the corona virus outbreak.

Apple Mobility Trends Report

Apple's portal, which it calls the Mobility Trends Reports, is the more straightforward of the
two to use, pulling in anonymized data from routing requests. In other words, it counts how
many times people request driving, walking, or transit directions during a day, and then plots
the number of those requests on a chart.

When you first load up the page you'll see this data aggregated by country. Germany's routing
requests through Apple Maps are down by 37 percent from baseline at the time of writing, for
example. The US is down by the same margin.

Look back to the middle of January, and you'll see how this compares with normal life, with
spikes during the day and the week as people move from place to place. As more localities
impose Covid-19 lockdowns, the numbers start to drop. A steeper line means a more drastic
lockdown, or at least closer adherence to those orders.

Using the search box up at the top of the chart, you can look up statistics for particular parts
of the world and the US. Try typing in a city or a country, for example. Apple splits up each
region's data by walking, driving, and public transit directions for countries where Apple Maps
provides it. You can see far more dramatic drops in countries like Singapore, which put in
strong restrictions early, than Sweden, which has taken a more relaxed stance toward social
distancing.

The statistics are intriguing, but bear in mind they only tell a part of the overall picture. People
on foot may not typically need directions as much as people in cars, for example. There are
also seasonal differences to account for, as people all tend to spend more time indoors during

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January and February anyway, at least in the parts of the world where those months count as
winter..

Google Community Mobility Reports

To view Google's equivalent data, head to its Community Mobility Reports page. You'll see it's
built along the same sort of lines. There's no handy online chart, so you need to
click Download PDF next to the country, state, or city you want to take a look at, but what you
get in return is a bit more detailed than Apple's offering. As well as the countries listed, you
can use the search box to look up individual US states or cities around the world.

Google's approach varies slightly in that it aggregates data about where people are spending
their time, rather than collecting numbers of navigation requests. If your phone is at a
residential location more often than normal, for example, or at a park location less often, this
will show up in the graphs.

The graphs themselves aren't quite as detailed as Apple's but cover the following location
categories: retail and recreation, grocery and pharmacy, parks, transit stations, workplaces
and residential. In most parts of the world, you'll see a major shift from workplaces to
residential over the last couple of months.

As with the Apple data, don't be too quick to make sweeping generalizations—Google's
mapping data isn't necessarily quite as comprehensive or as accurate across each country,
so it's difficult to make comparisons. Some regions will have much more in the way of retail
space than others as well, so they're starting from a different baseline.

Map-Tracking Privacy

If you're wondering whether data from your phone is included in these reports, the answer is
yes, probably. However, both Apple and Google are keen to emphasize that they've collected
this data with user privacy in mind.

"Data that is sent from users' devices to the Maps service is associated with random, rotating
identifiers so Apple doesn’t have a profile of your movements and searches," Apple says.
"Apple Maps has no demographic information about our users, so we can't make any
statements about the representativeness of our usage against the overall population."

For Google's part, the privacy disclaimer says this: "No personally identifiable information,
such as an individual's location, contacts, or movement will be made available at any point.
Insights in these reports are created with aggregated, anonymized sets of data from users
who have turned on the Location History setting, which is off by default."

In other words, Apple and Google are pulling this data without any personally identifiable
information attached, aggregating it from the mass of location reports being sent back to their
servers on a regular basis.

When it comes to privacy, location is one of the pieces of data that worries people the most.
No one wants third parties snooping on their whereabouts or tracking them on a map. But in

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our modern times, it's very difficult to use a Smartphone without allowing Apple and Google to
log your whereabouts.

You can control which apps on your phone can see your location and make a record of it. On
Android, go to Settings, Location and App permission; on iOS, launch Settings then
choose Privacy and Location Services.

Separate from these options, Apple and Google can still track your device's whereabouts as
part of the iOS and Android operating systems. It's how those "find your phone" tools work,
and how your phone knows what the time and date is, and so on.

To stop this data from being collected on Android, head to Settings and Location, and turn
the Use location toggle switch to off. On an iPhone, open Settings then
choose Privacy and Location Services, and turn the Location Services toggle switch to Off.
Remember this means you won't be able to use any sort of mapping app on your phone.

If you leave those master settings on, you essentially have to trust Apple and Google to use
your location data securely and responsibly—both when that data is anonymized (for live
traffic updates in maps and Covid-19 tracking reports, for example), and when it isn't. (If Apple
and Google know where you live, they can tell you when the commute home is going to be
longer than normal.)