The current covid-19 situation is affecting our digital life, how companies are trying to dig into location data and extract meaningful correlations. Google and Apple will be launching a user movement tracing solution which raises questions about user privacy. Another way is using anonymized GPS data that comes from smartphones.

I listened to Software Engineering Daily where Ryan Fox Squire talked about SafeGraph. Ryan is a senior data scientist at SafeGraph. He talked about the issues that SafeGuard aimed to solve with geospatial datasets. Over 400 organizations are using it in the US to fight with covid-19. Using the data to understand how the lockdown works.

These aggregated GPS data points make it possible to understand a location. Knowing its shape and usual visitor density it is possible to predict the risk of reopening the place. They can measure the effectiveness of stay-at-home policies. The data is freely available for researchers, academics and government organizations.

References

Meyerson, Jeff. (2020 May 11). Social Distancing Data with Ryan Fox Squire. Software Engineering Daily. https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/05/11/social-distancing-data-with-ryan-fox-squire/