This report describes the aggregation and anonymization process applied to the initial version of COVID-19 Search Trends symptoms dataset (published at https://goo.gle/covid19symptomdataset on September 2, 2020), a publicly available dataset that shows aggregated, anonymized trends in Google searches for symptoms (and some related topics). The anonymization process is designed to protect the daily symptom search activity of every user with ε-differential privacy for ε = 1.68.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2009.01265,
title = {Google COVID-19 Search Trends Symptoms Dataset: Anonymization Process Description (version 1.0)},
author = {Shailesh Bavadekar and Andrew Dai and John Davis and Damien Desfontaines and Ilya Eckstein and Katie Everett and Alex Fabrikant and Gerardo Flores and Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Krishna Gadepalli and Shane Glass and Rayman Huang and Chaitanya Kamath and Dennis Kraft and Akim Kumok and Hinali Marfatia and Yael Mayer and Benjamin Miller and Adam Pearce and Irippuge Milinda Perera and Venky Ramachandran and Karthik Raman and Thomas Roessler and Izhak Shafran and Tomer Shekel and Charlotte Stanton and Jacob Stimes and Mimi Sun and Gregory Wellenius and Masrour Zoghi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.01265},
year = {2020}
}