Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports: Anonymization Process Description (version 1.1)
Abstract
This document describes the aggregation and anonymization process applied to the initial version of Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports (published at http://google.com/covid19/mobility on April 2, 2020), a publicly available resource intended to help public health authorities understand what has changed in response to work-from-home, shelter-in-place, and other recommended policies aimed at flattening the curve of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our anonymization process is designed to ensure that no personal data, including an individual's location, movement, or contacts, can be derived from the resulting metrics. The high-level description of the procedure is as follows: we first generate a set of anonymized metrics from the data of Google users who opted in to Location History. Then, we compute percentage changes of these metrics from a baseline based on the historical part of the anonymized metrics. We then discard a subset which does not meet our bar for statistical reliability, and release the rest publicly in a format that compares the result to the private baseline.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2004.04145,
title = {Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports: Anonymization Process Description (version 1.1)},
author = {Ahmet Aktay and Shailesh Bavadekar and Gwen Cossoul and John Davis and Damien Desfontaines and Alex Fabrikant and Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Krishna Gadepalli and Bryant Gipson and Miguel Guevara and Chaitanya Kamath and Mansi Kansal and Ali Lange and Chinmoy Mandayam and Andrew Oplinger and Christopher Pluntke and Thomas Roessler and Arran Schlosberg and Tomer Shekel and Swapnil Vispute and Mia Vu and Gregory Wellenius and Brian Williams and Royce J Wilson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.04145},
year = {2020}
}