Google Launches COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports Website

Google said a while back that it would be using data to provide users with information on coronavirus/COVID-19, the United States, and around the world. Its website offering specific community mobility reports is now open. It looks at several factors to see how well people in the area adhering to the stay-at-home orders to help fight coronavirus.

The website, which can be accessed here, breaks down every country and, in the United States, breaks down a state-by-state basis. The individual state PDF files also further breakdown changes in several categories per county. The information Google gathered tracks trends over time by geography across categories like retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.

In many of the areas we looked at, Google didn’t have enough data to provide an overall historical trend, but the information it does have is eye-opening. Google notes that data featured in these reports is 2 to 3 days old. The idea is to display a change in visits to specific locations during the coronavirus outbreak. Google promises that additional countries, regions, and languages will be added in the coming weeks, and it will continue to update the information regularly.

Google says it developed the Community Mobility Reports to be helpful, and the data was gathered while adhering to privacy protocols in protecting people’s privacy. Google says, no personally identifiable information was gathered like an individual’s location, contacts, or movement. The search giant says that sort of data won’t be made available at any point. Data is gathered only from users who have the Location History setting turned on; those who don’t want to be used in the sort report can turn that feature off.