Google releases location data to show if coronavirus lockdowns working in 131 countries

A very good use of big data, if and only if it is anonymised.

Is it just me or does the fact that they can do this send chills down your back?!

I mean, I think we all know in the back of our minds that Google is capable of this, but this really is the stuff of Orwell.

And, sure, it is anonymised, but that is purely because Google chose to do so.

We need look no further than China to see the Orwellian world that is coming once governments decide to make use of these tools.

@zones2surf: I found absurd how, since the beginning, the Korean (Chinese) tracking system was praised. I feel how here in the West they adopted the lockdown because they knew Western people would be way more scared by some kind of blatant tracking system. But I am sure the so called "phase 2", to come back to "normality", will involve some tracking system app, that people will accept way more easily after months of lockdown. The scary thing is that some guy on 4chan had predicted this situation with a post at the end of January, saying like Italy was the Country that will start the lockdown of the whole Country. You can say he probably wrote only some conspiracy theory that accidentally became true, but I still wonder how this was possible.

Orwellian- Really? Why, I'll assume it's a blend of '1984' and 'Animal Farm a fairy story' that we fear. These are yesterday's fiction and do not apply to what google does 'today'.

For all the frantic effort to coordinate life-saving work around the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital age finds itself hampered in one very specific respect: information. Teams of artificial intelligence researchers are trying to bring decades of technology to bear on the problem of diagnosing and treating the disease, but the data they need to develop their software programs is scattered around the globe, making it practically inaccessible.

We need today solutions for today's problems.