US Officials Use Mobile Ad Location Data to Study How COVID-19 Spreads (wsj.com) 66
An anonymous reader quotes the Wall Street Journal:
Government officials across the U.S. are using location data from millions of cellphones in a bid to better understand the movements of Americans during the coronavirus pandemic and how they may be affecting the spread of the disease...
The data comes from the mobile advertising industry rather than cellphone carriers. The aim is to create a portal for federal, state and local officials that contains geolocation data in what could be as many as 500 cities across the U.S., one of the people said, to help plan the epidemic response... It shows which retail establishments, parks and other public spaces are still drawing crowds that could risk accelerating the transmission of the virus, according to people familiar with the matter... The data can also reveal general levels of compliance with stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders, according to experts inside and outside government, and help measure the pandemic's economic impact by revealing the drop-off in retail customers at stores, decreases in automobile miles driven and other economic metrics.
The CDC has started to get analyses based on location data through through an ad hoc coalition of tech companies and data providers — all working in conjunction with the White House and others in government, people said.
The CDC and the White House didn't respond to requests for comment.
It's the cellphone carriers turning over pandemic-fighting data in Germany, Austria, Spain, Belgium, the U.K., according to the article, while Israel mapped infections using its intelligence agencies' antiterrorism phone-tracking. But so far in the U.S., "the data being used has largely been drawn from the advertising industry.
"The mobile marketing industry has billions of geographic data points on hundreds of millions of U.S. cell mobile devices..."
The data comes from the mobile advertising industry rather than cellphone carriers. The aim is to create a portal for federal, state and local officials that contains geolocation data in what could be as many as 500 cities across the U.S., one of the people said, to help plan the epidemic response... It shows which retail establishments, parks and other public spaces are still drawing crowds that could risk accelerating the transmission of the virus, according to people familiar with the matter... The data can also reveal general levels of compliance with stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders, according to experts inside and outside government, and help measure the pandemic's economic impact by revealing the drop-off in retail customers at stores, decreases in automobile miles driven and other economic metrics.
The CDC has started to get analyses based on location data through through an ad hoc coalition of tech companies and data providers — all working in conjunction with the White House and others in government, people said.
The CDC and the White House didn't respond to requests for comment.
It's the cellphone carriers turning over pandemic-fighting data in Germany, Austria, Spain, Belgium, the U.K., according to the article, while Israel mapped infections using its intelligence agencies' antiterrorism phone-tracking. But so far in the U.S., "the data being used has largely been drawn from the advertising industry.
"The mobile marketing industry has billions of geographic data points on hundreds of millions of U.S. cell mobile devices..."
Amateurs (Score:3, Funny)
But so far in the U.S., "the data being used has largely been drawn from the advertising industry.
I can't fault them for that. When it comes to surveillance and spying even the NSA, Mossad and Shin Bet are a bunch of clueless amateurs compared to the advertising industry.
Everyone uses their best resources (Score:5, Interesting)
Israel has a surveillance nobody could hold a candle to.
Europe has an unparalleled infrastructure industry.
The US is number one in advertising.
hmm...
There is a joke here waiting to be made, but I can't really find it.
Re: Everyone uses their best resources (Score:1)
Re: Everyone uses their best resources (Score:1)
Re: Everyone uses their best resources (Score:1)
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Would you prefer to have this conversation in German? Or is French more your thing? I'm sorry, English is only my third language, so occasional mishaps are to be expected.
But I hope I could improve, could you point out where I failed to use a proper English term for something?
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Amazing what things you can read out of a posting that is completely unrelated to anything you claim here. May I borrow your crystal ball at times?
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But I hope I could improve, could you point out where I failed to use a proper English term for something?
Israel has a surveillance nobody could hold a candle to.
Not only is this awkwardly phrased, it doesn't actually make sense - I suspect you've missed a word out.
I would rearrange it, to say something like: No other country can hold a candle to Israel's state surveillance apparatus.
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Compare the regard with which the rest of the world holds scientists with the regard American do. The rest of the world wins.
Compare leaders of the other democracies with the allege president. Which ones (1) drove their companies into the ditch six times, (2) are in hock to the Russians, (3) were former game show hosts? The only one who comes close is the PM of Ukraine, being a comedian before PM. However, now he's a serious PM while the alleged president has the attention span of gnat and seems to regard t
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When someone tries to fix it someone struts in with a heavy check in their pocket and says "He said something transphobic and he also raped three women".
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Israel has a surveillance nobody could hold a candle to.
Europe has an unparalleled infrastructure industry.
The US is number one in advertising.
hmm...
There is a joke here waiting to be made, but I can't really find it.
It has that because it has the infrastructure built for that. And so did Korea by the way. Mobile phone location eats signalling capacity like there is no tomorrow. They had that signalling already available.
USA does not. I ran into that when looking into a similar problem space and reviewing GSMA APIs 8 years ago.
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"The US is number one in advertising.
hmm...
There is a joke here waiting to be made, but I can't really find it."
The US will be great in detecting illegal hairdresser saloons in backrooms.
Re:Everyone uses their best resources (Score:5, Insightful)
Normally I'd fucking hate whats happening, but this is such a disturbing pandemic. A joke I've seen passed around online goes something like "Is it that bad? Yes, Anarchists imploring people to cooperate with the authorities and fascists are encouraging people to disobey the law.". Shit is backwards right now.
The truth is, the single factor that has allowed China to so effectively turn things around is the sheer depths of its surveilance society. I saw a video of a guy walking around in some chinese city, going shopping for a meal. Everything was surveiled. He had an app he had to report his motions to. He had to scan a barcode at the noodle bar and then people where being made to sit a certain distance. This is north korea level social control.
BUT its actually what works. And I fucking hate it, because it goes against every anti-authoritarian bone in my body. But I also think that in six months when god willing we have a vaccine or have manage to contain and defeat this thing, and we can start putting society back together we're going to need some serious discussion about how to put this surveilance genie back in the bottle.
7.5kb of DNA brings down the world. Who'd have thought it.
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...The truth is, the single factor that has allowed China to so effectively turn things around is the sheer depths of its surveilance society....
State surveillance did play a big role in China's effectiveness against the Coronavirus.
But I think the biggest factor in their slowing down and containing COVID-19 is Xi's ability to lockdown China, something Trump can't do here in the US, no matter how much he might want to. The best he can do is issue a travel advisory.
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More likely the contagion simply ran it's course. Testing is the problem, you can not simply test those who show the most symptoms and ignore those who showed minor or negligible symptoms. Real tested should have been based around travel choke points and testing everyone. It seems as time progresses, that corona virus is less dangerous than influenza but far more contagious. Not testing and recording those who got minor or negligible symptoms completely disrupted the appropriate level of response.
There is a
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On 23 January 2020, the central government of China imposed a lockdown in Wuhan and other cities... (in) an effort to quarantine the centre of an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)... The World Health Organization (WHO), although stating that it was beyond its own guidelines, commended the move, calling it "unprecedented in public health history".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hubei_lockdowns [wikipedia.org]
And now, China is concerned that COVID-19 hasn't run its course there - that a second wave may be coming. Some speculate it's because people will stop practicing social distancing before they should, but I'm hearing about reinfected victims too. Truth is, we just don't know enough yet to say.
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Going authoritarian still is not the right move, its never the right move. As humans we can choose to cooperate and accomplish cooperation without martial law. Some people will learn their lesson the hard way and we'll all be better off in the next pandemic. People do not deal well with change, this is our first pandemic in 100 years and its a big change for everyone.
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this is our first pandemic in 100 years and its a big change for everyone.
The H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic was in 2009.
Re: Everyone uses their best resources (Score:1)
Yes, but it doesn't count when it didn't affect me personally. Also as a voter my memory doesn't go back further than the 24 hour news cycle.
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So you are saying we should go authoritarian? Perhaps I was wrong there, however H1N1 didn't close schools and businesses all of the US simultaneously. That last time we saw anything like this was the Spanish Flu of 1918, about 100 years ago. We still don't need martial law and forced check-ins or any other authoritarians BS.
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The mobile marketing industry has billions of pornographic data points on hundreds of millions of U.S. cell mobile devices..."
FTFY
And this is why . . . (Score:2)
You either get an adblocker for your mobile surfing or clear your cache and cookies at the end of every day. Pile up data which doesn't match with anything.
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On 21 March, the Federal Council prohibited gatherings of more than five people in public. With the help of Swisscom’s analyses and visualisations, we are assessing whether this measure is being respected. At no point do we receive location data from Swisscom, merely analyses and visualisations. The data on which the analyses are based are anonymised and aggregated. It is not possible to make inferences about specific individuals.
This is pretty obvious (Score:2)
It's people interacting without the proper masks/protective space/etc. or having not been tested.
Obviously, in a household, spread is going to happen, like on a cruise ship (proven a few times).
We walk our dog and drive to the grocery (3 blocks, local, not a chain) and walk to do restaurant carry out (both to support those local businesses, and dehydrated/canned food gets old real fast).
We ordered puzzles online. I'm believe these cause complete insanity though.
VR is really nice to get away (Oculus Quest,
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"Why do the nutjobs always put spaces between lines in their posts? You can always tell when it is wacko suburbanite paranoid nutjobs."
It's just a LF instead of a space even if you think it's 50 spaces.
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Did you forget to take your meds?
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"Obviously, in a household, spread is going to happen, like on a cruise ship (proven a few times)."
And soon it will also be proven on Army hospitals ships designed to treat bullet wounds.
Re:This is pretty obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering the ships are being deployed to treat injuries - like bullet wounds or auto accident wounds - that seems like a good idea. See, by taking those cases out of the hospitals, those hospitals will now have more resources available to handle COVID cases.
Maybe you made a few foolish assumptions in your ignorance?
Fuck the mobile advertising industry (Score:2)
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They told us this is to show better ads (Score:1)
Re:They told us this is to show better ads (Score:4, Informative)
This goes back to the Nixon Administration. Eliot Richardson was head of Health Education and Welfare when HEW conducted a study of the privacy implications of these new computer things. The study was astonishingly prescient; however after one of several Watergate instigated cabinet shakeups Richardson was moved to defense, and then later famously to AG, and future Reagan defense secretary Caspar Weinberger took his place at HEW.
It was too late to change the study's body, but Weinberger rewrote the study's conclusions and executive summary, focusing those things exclusively on *government* misuse of data. His recommended legislative response, which was enacted, was to prevent the government agencies from collecting and sharing privacy-intruding data on citizens, but to allow private industry to do so and sell it to those very same government agencies.
This in effect provided a fig leaf for the government to invade citizens' privacy, as long as it did it through private contractors.
Uhm... South Korea? (Score:5, Interesting)
South Korea is just about the only democracy to have stopped the virus spread, and they already did this cellphone tracking thing - along with other techniques such as mass testing, without a massive lockdown. So their economy was not as destroyed.
If a problem has already been solved by another country, I do not understand why we are ignoring it.
The WSJ not even mentioning South Korea in an article like this is mind boggling.
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I think we are in some kind of mass-mental disorder where people somehow think their local city/state/country is somehow made up of a different species than the rest of the world, and somehow not only will it never come here, but what worked elsewhere should be ignored and we can figure it out by ourselves.
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They found everyone who had contact via past smartphone use to track movements and tested. With tests that worked.
The people who got infected got help. People in contact with the infected got tested, helped as needed.
Just use the telco data. Like the NSA, FBI, GCHQ would.
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South Korea didn't have to restrict the use of masks for civillians because they didn't have enough to supply healthcare professionals otherwise.
South Korea will let you test yourself for Corona. It costs 170 bucks I believe.
Which will be refunded by the government if you get testet positive.
These are things that happen in a country with socialized health care and a mentality of investing in your populace (which includes putting up the finances to stockpile and secure production of basic necessities). The U
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I think we are in some kind of mass-mental disorder where people somehow think their local city/state/country is somehow made up of a different species than the rest of the world
It's already been well established that ACE2 is key to the SARS-CoV-2 virus entering human cells, and it's already established that ACE2 receptors vary widely by ethnic/racial groups. It follows that some people of ethnicities or races with a relatively high level of ACE2 receptors will be more susceptible to infection, and when infected more susceptible to severe viral loads. There is nothing racist or xenophobic about that information. It's only heresy to liberals because it highlights the potentially fat
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Source:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-020-0147-1/
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I would, but I am scared of the undead ones.
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I think we are in some kind of mass-mental disorder where people somehow think their local city/state/country is somehow made up of a different species than the rest of the world
It's already been well established that ACE2 is key to the SARS-CoV-2 virus entering human cells, and it's already established that ACE2 receptors vary widely by ethnic/racial groups. It follows that some people of ethnicities or races with a relatively high level of ACE2 receptors will be more susceptible to infection...
Allow me to quote from the paper you link to: "Our findings indicated that no direct evidence was identified genetically supporting the existence of coronavirus S-protein binding-resistant ACE2 mutants in different populations."
In other words the paper you cite does not support your assertion.
... it highlights the potentially fatal consequences of the "race is a social construct" mindset
By and large, though I would agree not exclusively, 'race' is a social construct, one which, in certain societies, has very serious consequences. That's not to say genetic differences do not exist - clearly they do, bu
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people somehow think their local city/state/country is somehow made up of a different species than the rest of the world
I think by now, it's quite obvious that there are two species of humans, capable of interbreeding but also resulting in two separate tribes of "coastal elites" and Trump supporters.
other secret sources...(evil KJ... , no bad... ,) (Score:1)
Mobile phone tracking in US (Score:2)
I'll leave this here for you:
https://twitter.com/TectonixGE... [twitter.com]
Shared to get government support (Score:2)
Providing this information to the government will go a long way towards having the government back off on legislating limits on "evil advertising industry tracking data".
Maybe it isn't so bad that Facebook knows who your friends are, and where you all hang out.
Good to have the data (Score:2)
Not so good to get it this way. But you would never get people in the US to actually agree to share their location on such a mass scale. Those other countries, in addition to have the infrastructure to support it, have citizens who are not so twitchy about letting the authorities know stuff about them. What's strange is how naturally the US has embraced allowing corporations to have this information. I don't understand this trust in the "free market" more than the trust your own government institutions. Sur
France detected 10% of parisians leaving last day (Score:2)
The day the French president announced we'd be confined 'starting tomorrow', twice as much parisian cars passed the highway gates going out.
Then the GSM companies were asked to show their 2~3 days tracks 'in an integrated way', and also demonstrated clear movement of slightly above 10% of the population leaving...
Now I'm a French living far from Paris, who am I to say...