Heidi Jern, Public Policy Manager Finland & Sweden, Google

Over the past few months, Google has taken action on many fronts to help individuals, governments and businesses use our services to find useful information and stay connected. All initiatives are collected on this page. But for now, we want to highlight two initiatives in particular through which we are helping governments understand how people's mobility has changed and how technology can be used for disease tracking.

The mobility reports aim to provide insights into what has changed in people's behaviors as government and policy advice and restrictions have been implemented, and are something we chose to produce after these agencies expressed a need for this type of data to reduce the spread of infection. Using anonymised and aggregated data that does not contain any personally identifiable information, we are able to show trends in how and where people are moving in regularly updated reports. The reports are based on sets of data from users who have enabled the location history setting, which is turned off by default. In our blog, we describe in more detail what this is and the underlying methodology.

The second initiative is a collaboration between Google and Apple. This partnership aims to help governments and health authorities reduce the spread of infection using Bluetooth technology. A number of leading health authorities, universities and NGOs around the world have been working to develop voluntary contact tracing solutions. As part of this technology development, Apple and Google will launch a comprehensive contact tracing solution that includes APIs and operating system level technologies. This first stage, the launch of the API enabling interoperability between Android and iOS devices with contact tracing apps approved by public health authorities, will take place this May.

Why have you taken this initiative?

Google is a big company with a lot of potential to contribute with information and tools, and it is therefore obvious to us that we should do what we can to help alleviate the crisis. The two initiatives I mentioned here are very concrete examples of this. Through the Mobility Reports, we are helping authorities to get useful information on compliance with recommendations. Through our partnership with Apple, we are developing the technology to make contact tracing apps work in practice.

What do you want to achieve?

We hope that these tools can support authorities around the world in their complex work. The collaboration with Apple is realized in a way that protects the privacy and security of users while offering a solution that enables contact tracing to reduce the spread of infection.

Who are you targeting with your initiative?

These two initiatives are mainly aimed at public authorities, but of course we always have our users in mind. Therefore, we want to contribute with information and technical solutions that do not compromise users' privacy. The mobility reports are public and also visualize for individuals how individual changes in mobility have a wider impact and remind us all of our responsibility to curb the spread of infection.