The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Data reveal which Americans are social distancing (and not)
If you have a smartphone, you’re probably contributing to a massive coronavirus surveillance system. And it’s revealing where Americans have — and haven’t — been practicing social distancing.
The scores are in
On Tuesday, a company called Unacast that collects and analyzes phone GPS location data launched a “Social Distancing Scoreboard” that grades, county by county, which residents are changing behavior at the urging of health officials. It uses the reduction in the total distance we travel as a rough index for whether we’re staying at home. Comparing the nation’s mass movements from March 20 to an average Friday, Washington, D.C., gets an A, while Wyoming
as a whole earns an F.
How do they know that?
Efforts to track public health during the coronavirus pandemic are a reminder of the ways phones reveal our personal lives, as individuals and in the aggregate. Unacast’s location data comes from games, shopping and utility apps that tens of millions of Americans have on their phones — information the company normally analyzes for retailers, real estate firms and marketers.
It’s not alone. Google also collects and shares where we go. Long before the coronavirus, the Google Maps app has included a live read of how busy destinations are, based on location data. Instagram, too, lets you see other people who’ve recently shared updates from places. Both tools are useful for anyone who wants to practice social distancing and avoid spaces that are busy.
There’s no evidence the U.S. government is using phones to enforce stay-at-home orders or track patients. But South Korea has used an app to track thousands of quarantined people whose phone would alert authorities if they left home, and Britain, Germany and Italy are among the European nations considering the use of individual location data in fighting the virus. The U.S. government is in talks with Facebook, Google and other tech companies about using anonymous location data to combat the virus.