Big Brother, Watching Your Social Distancing

So far this week, it looks like Coronavirus is taking aim at three things:

1. The British royal family, with Prince Charles announcing a positive diagnosis
2. Easter, with egg prices in the United States soaring and hoarders gobbling up the surplus egg supply that was being built up for Donald Trump’s Easter.
3. Local news.
4. Your privacy.

And maybe that last one is a bit overblown.

But here’s this company, Unacast, using GPS data from cell phones to grade us, county by county, on whether we’re doing the social distancing we should.

I say company, but I’m not sure who these dudebros from Norway are.

Here’s their privacy statement:

The Social Distancing Scoreboard and other tools being developed for the Covid-19 Toolkit do not identify any individual person, device, or household. However to calculate the actual underlying social indexing score we combine tens of millions of anonymous mobile phones and their interactions with each other each day - and then extrapolate the results to the population level. As a company that originated in Norway we put privacy front and center and believe it to be an individual right, and since we operate on both sides of the Atlantic, we have been operating within the GDPR guidelines since May 2018 and this year also adopted the CCPA guidelines for the whole of the US (not only California).

But [enter the wormy med student from “Young Frankenstein”] isn’t it true they could they identify individuals via cellphone? Probably, given the technology available. We’re seeing such tracking in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and probably other places too.

Temporary measures, you say.

Maybe.

But we are in the era of paranoid/populist governments, where such temporary measures could become the norm, you know.

I know this sounds paranoid. And I would have to say if someone official wanted to use my phone GPS to track my whereabouts and movements, my inherent Dutch stubbornness would be to tell them to pound sand. And I’d leave my phone home.

Also, part of me looks at their county-by-county data and things, well, this is kinda like a heat map for distance as well as population. Out west, where I live, things are further apart than in other areas of the country. And looking at Alaska, where they’re being praised for little movements in their boroughs or census areas, I’ll wager population is sparse for the most part (or concentrated, such as in Anchorage) so the data from this month might not look all that different from the data from this time last year.

There are just a lot of questions here, even setting privacy aside.

I do not confess to be a genius. My analysis here is totally by the seat of my pants. But I’d like to ask these dudebros some questions.