Coronavirus: Government pulls telco location data for Covid-19 pandemic planning

Thursday, 9 April 2020

New Zealand location data is helping the Government assess and plan its response to Covid-19, data brokerage Data Ventures can reveal.

The data, from telecommunications companies, was being crunched by Data Ventures, a commercial arm of Statistics New Zealand that gets data sets from private organisations and turns them into useful products to sell to government agencies.

Data Ventures has been working within the National Crisis Management Centre for several weeks, helping the Government understand Kiwis' movements and behaviours and what they mean in the country's fight against Covid-19.

The location data was aggregated and anonymised, and provided an hourly snapshot of how many people were in a given area. Typically, the public sector used the information for planning tourism peaks and troughs, emergency planning models and shopping trends.

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Currently, pandemic modelling was its 'most critical use and number one priority', Data Ventures executive director Drew Broadley told Stuff.

While the data didn't allow for an individual's movements to be followed, it highlighted areas where a lot of people were coming and going. 'These are our danger areas for community transmission.'

If necessary, the Government was able to then issue targeted messages, reminding people to stick to their bubbles.

Since lockdown — as expected — the data has revealed a 'total change' in Kiwis' behaviour, Broadley said. 'Until we get back to a regular pattern, the hours of shopping will continue to change, people's movements will continue to change.

'We'll get a new pattern and things will settle down, but it'll take several weeks.'

The prime minister's announcements between March 29 and March 25 — about New Zealand's borders closing, the implementation of the alert level system, and subsequent declarations of the country being at Level 3 and Level 4 — appear to have immediately prompted spikes in some activities, and declines in others.

'It's been good to be able to see when an announcement is made, the impact on essential services. We can see two, supermarkets and hospitals, where increased pressures on the workforce are obvious.

'It's good for the Government to understand how much these services are being stretched.'

Within days of the country closing its borders to non-residents on March 19, Queenstown experienced a 90 per cent decline in international visitor numbers.

'We can unfortunately see the death of tourism in three days.'

Overall, Broadley said, New Zealand appeared to be 'doing well' in complying with lockdown measures.

That message was echoed in Google data, released last week as part of a global mobility report. The report showed a 91 per cent drop in Kiwis visiting 'retail and recreation' venues such as cafes and shopping centres, and a 54 per cent drop in people visiting grocery stores and pharmacies.

Google's data was based on users opting to share their location history, whereas Data Ventures used cell tower location data adjusted to be representative of the country's population. (Cell tower location data included — within a much larger radius than GPS data — all cellphones with SIM cards, not just those connected to the internet.)

Data Ventures has also been in discussions with the Government about using location and potentially spending data to assist manual contract tracing, the laborious process of tracing the movements of a person with the virus, to find others they may have infected.

China pioneered the approach, using an extension to the WeChat app to control movement and entry to public spaces and public transport. People were assigned a green, orange or red code according to their health status, which allowed either free movement, local movement or no movement (quarantine).

Privacy Commissioner John Edwards has said health authorities can commandeer information from telecommunications companies under exceptions to the Privacy Act. However, any new software should undergo a privacy impact assessment and also be time-limited.

At this stage, Broadley said, Data Ventures along with the Office of the Privacy Commission has only been advising government officials on strategies around cell location and applications.

Even if its data provided individual location records — which it didn't — it was generally not accurate enough to pinpoint someone's location. However, it could be a 'back up', if necessary.

Broadley emphasised Data Ventures was working closely with the Privacy Commission to ensure protection of people's privacy.

Commissioner John Edwards has previously said the agency provided a good example of how to deal with mobile data.