Facebook starts sharing location data of its users with researchers to track and anticipate the coronavirus

Facebook has begun to expand its initiative, Data for Good, which gives researchers access to data on movement patterns, focusing on the data that may help understand whether the measures taken to combat the pandemic of disease coronaviruses are working.

Until now, the company led by Mark Zuckerberg had been sharing with the scientific community maps on the population movement, researchers and non-profit organizations are using to better understand how you are developing this health crisis.

The novelty, have been reported since Facebook, is that now they will offer three new types of maps developed from the data location of its users. Data added, emphasized, “to protect the privacy of individuals”.

Maps of disease prevention made in Facebook

The maps of disease prevention that Facebook produces are sets of aggregated information that health researchers can use, explained from the company, “to better understand how population dynamics influence the spread of the disease”.

Maps that, as in the case of the plane from Italy that precedes these lines, reveal the probability that the inhabitants of an area to come in contact with people of other. This information, crossed with other data, could help identify in which places can appear with higher probability of new cases of COVID-19 in terms of the restrictions of movement are lifted, for example.

Another of the maps that Facebook is sharing with the scientific community are the ones that reveal the trends of the range-of-motion. In essence, show at the regional level if the people of that place will tend to stay close to your home or, on the contrary, tend to move beyond their environment.

This information, delimited in time in periods of confinement required, for example, could show if the standards are being met in an effective way.

Finally, Facebook has created a third type of map that shows what we have called the index of social connectivity. These maps show from the data of the platform of the friendships of people in other regions and countries. That, they say from the company, “it can help epidemiologists to predict the probability of spread of the disease”.

The technology in the us, with a long history of controversies around privacy, ensures that in addition to using only aggregated data and, therefore, anonymous, has taken additional measures for the concealment of the identity of the people is greater, thereby reducing the risk of identification.

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The news

Facebook starts sharing location data of its users with researchers to track and anticipate the coronavirus

it was originally published in

Engadget

by
Toni Castillo

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