How are Floridians doing with distancing?
This week, Orange County issued a stay-athome order and many other counties are expected to soon follow suit. You might be wondering: How can they enforce that?
In some ways, policing the whereabouts of every one of Orange County’s 1.3 million residents would be impossible. But one technology company is grading how well each state and county in the United States is doing when it comes to social distancing.
Tech firm Unacast collects location data from more than 127 million smartphones that have installed certain apps in categories from games to shopping to utilities. Normally, they sell that data to retailers, real estate companies and marketers.
Now, they’ve launched a new tool in light of the COVID-19 pandemic: the “Social Distancing Scoreboard.”
Based on data updated March 21, Florida received the grade of B, with people traveling an average distance of almost 39 percent less when compared with pre-COVID-19 data. The state’s top counties exercising social distancing, all earning As, are also some that have been hardest hit by the virus: Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Orange, Osceola and Seminole.
According to Unacast’s data, Florida’s worst counties when it comes to social distancing are those in the Panhandle that have been least impacted by known cases of COVID-19: Gadsden, Columbia, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton. In those places, traveling behavior is largely unchanged, or in some cases, increased.
Overall, the U.S. also received a B, with Americans traveling, on average, a distance of almost 40 percent less than during a normal time period. States that ranked highest in social distancing scores, all receiving As, included Alaska, Nevada, New Jersey, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia. Those places all saw a 50-to-60 percent decrease in average distance traveled.
Some of the hardest-hit locales are also experiencing less movement. In New York City, which now has more than 15,000 positive cases, residents are now traveling an average distance that’s up to 70 percent less than before the pandemic arrived in the city. Many California counties, now under a statewide “shelter in place” order, received As with residents traveling an average distance of more than 40 percent less than compared with normal times.
Unacast put together the free tool with the goal of enabling “governments, institutions, and organizations fighting the virus to understand the efficacy of social distancing initiatives,” according to their website, also adding: “The more we all understand, the more lives we can save together.”
The New York Times recently conducted a similar analysis using smartphone movement data from Descartes Labs. Their results shed a different perspective that contrasts with what Unacast’s data shows.
In the Times’ examination published March 23, which also used average distance traveled as the primary metric, the South and Midwest lag behind other parts of the country in social distancing practices. The data shows that while Florida’s mobility has lessened, it falls behind 30 other states when it comes to how much people’s movement has slowed in recent weeks.
It’s worth remembering that Unacast’s grading scale, while somewhat reflective of social distancing success, is also subjective.
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Florida’s social distancing efforts are similar in the Times’ data, with Osceola, Broward, Miami-Dade, Seminole and Orange counties showing the biggest decrease in average distance traveled. However, the movement data from both sources could change in the coming weeks as the state’s confirmed cases grow and local shelter-in-place orders are enacted.
Unacast isn’t alone in collecting location data: While the fact that a single firm is tracking location data from more than 127 million smartphones might seem astonishing, Unacast certainly isn’t alone in its approach.
Google also collects anonymous location data from millions of phones to update traffic on its maps platform and inform people of how busy certain stores and restaurants are in realtime. That’s something people can also use to determine the crowds at their local Publix or Walmart during the crisis to plan shopping trips accordingly.
Certain apps for weather, games and more will also collect location data that they can later sell to companies, a legal practice that’s often stipulated in the fine print of privacy agreements. Companies from Apple to Facebook have also been known to collect such anonymous data.
This kind of data collection, scary though it may be, can also aid public information efforts, such as a recent New York Times interactive piece about “how the virus got out.”
What does this mean for your privacy? In the case of Unacast’s Social Distancing Scoreboard and other similar tools, the company disclaims that it doesn’t “identify any individual person, device, or household.”
“However, to calculate the actual underlying social indexing score we combine tens of millions of anonymous mobile phones and their interactions with each other each day — and then extrapolate the results to the population level,” reads the company’s website.
While Unacast is looking to expand the datasets and layers in its COVID-19 toolkit, it also has yet to pick up on whether people are staying at least six feet apart, one of the main tenets of social distancing.
In theory, such data could also be used to enforce stay-at-home orders or track patients, but there’s no such evidence that the U.S. government is doing that, according to The Washington Post.
However, the Post reported last week that the U.S. government is talking with large tech companies about using anonymous location data to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, including tracking whether people are keeping safe distances from one another. The data would be managed by industry and health officials, who could use it for research.
If all of this still has you feeling rattled, it’s worth vetting smartphone apps to see which ones are collecting location data and how often. Location permissions can be revoked through settings or turned off altogether.
Guides from the New York Times help show how to prevent location tracking and tune-up privacy settings on your smartphone. Consumer Reports also offers a comprehensive guide on digital security and privacy.
To learn more: Visit Unacast’s “Social Distancing Scoreboard” here: unacast.com.