![]() ![]() Thomas Tsai, Brigham and Women’s Hospital Department of Surgery and Harvard T.H. Gregory Wellenius, Boston University School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health, Dr. Google’s approach to privacy was illustrated by the company’s collaboration with Prof. To date, the aggregated, anonymized data sets have been heavily used for scientific research and economic analysis, as well as informing policy making by national and local governments and inter-governmental organizations. The reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries, pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential. Since the beginning of the pandemic and during most of 2020, social distancing remained the primary mitigation strategy to combat the spread of COVID-19 in the United States.In responsetorequests from public health officials to provide aggregated, anonymized insights on community movement that could be used to make critical decisions to combat COVID-19, Google set up Community Mobility Reports to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. Given the sensitivity of mobility data, we needed to deliver this information in a privacy preserving way, and we’re honored to be recognized by FPF for our approach.” “We heard from the public health community that mobility data could help provide them an understanding of whether people were social distancing to interrupt the spread. Karen DeSalvo, Chief Health Officer, Google Health. “As the COVID-19 crisis emerged, Google moved to support public health officials and researchers with resources to help manage the spread,” said Dr. For the purposes of this award, we have combined both Google projects to produce a series of considerations for future data-sharing projects. Google was also recognized for a related project – the Google COVID-19 Aggregated Mobility Research Dataset – centered around the same underlying anonymized data with small differences in the privacy protections and procedures used. That was ultimately connected to decreases in COVID-19 case growth. Ultimately, researchers found that states with mobility policies experienced substantial reductions in time people spent away from their places of residence. Google’s Community Mobility Reports go through a robust anonymization process that employs differential privacy techniques to ensure that personal data, including an individual’s location, movement, or contacts, cannot be derived from the metrics, while providing researchers and public health authorities with valuable insights to help inform official decision making.Īs part of their award submission, Google submitted details about an example research collaboration with researchers from Boston University, Harvard University, and Brown University, which evaluated the impacts of state-level policies on mobility and subsequent COVID-19 case trajectories. Google has been recognized with the second-annual FPF Award for Research Data Stewardship for its work to produce, aggregate, anonymize, and share data on community movement during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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