Like Google at the beginning of April, it is Apple's turn to publish a tool to monitor the movement of population movements to help health authorities in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. "While respecting your privacy, we are now publishing consolidated mobility data , " Tim Cook announced on Twitter on Tuesday evening.
Hosted on the Apple site, the open access tool allows Internet users to search by city, region or country. Research has generated a trend in pedestrian, automobile and public transit travel since January. For Paris, these figures are respectively -93%, -88% and -92%.
The similarities to Google ads stop there. The Internet search giant uses the GPS of smartphones to track the movements of users of Google Maps, if they give permission, and keep the history. It is this feature that allows it to track car traffic in real time, identify slowdowns, and offer alternative routes on Maps. This aggregated and anonymized data also enables it to measure the time slots in which a museum, restaurant or exhibition attracts the most public, information which can be found on Google Maps.
A calculation based on the number of searches on Maps
Apple does not follow the movements of iPhone owners "and does not keep a history. The information in our new tool comes from the number of route searches carried out on Maps ” , explains the company. Clearly, if iPhone owners take their vehicle without calculating a route, they will not be taken into account by the Apple mobility tracking tool. This therefore makes it less precise than that of Google. "The availability of data is linked to several factors, including a minimum number of requests on Plans" , continues the company. Tuesday evening, travel data for the cities of Marseille, Bordeaux and Nantes were unavailable, unlike Paris, Lille and Lyon.
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The American company, which is a champion of privacy, wants to reassure its users. “Privacy protection is at the heart of Plans. The data collected by the application, such as the words searched, the routes calculated, and the traffic information are associated with random identifiers and are continually updated. Apple does not have a profile on your travels and your searches, " he said.
Last Friday, Apple and Google announced that they are working together to provide developers with the technological base necessary for the implementation of applications for tracking infected people, based on Bluetooth technology. This collaboration will allow Android and iOS devices to communicate with each other, in order to improve the efficiency of these tracking applications potentially developed by governments to contain the spread of the virus.