To help health officials to understand how people are moving around, Google is releasing anonymized data from Maps for 131 countries to the public, researchers, and governments.

Google said these reports might help public health officials understand people’s habits of making essential trips outside their homes, for things like buying groceries and medicines — and recommend ideal operational hours for businesses accordingly:.

In addition to other resources public health officials might have, we hope these reports will help support decisions about how to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.

For example, this information could help officials understand changes in essential trips that can shape recommendations on business hours or inform delivery service offerings.

The search giant said that data is collected from folks who have turned on their location history in Google Maps!

It added that data collected for these trends is anonymized and “no personally identifiable information will be made available at any point.”.

In a separate effort, Facebook is also providing location data to researchers in the US to measure the effectiveness of social distancing efforts?

In the US, mobile ad companies are also sharing data with health authorities and state governments. Taiwan, Israel, and Singapore are other examples of governments relying on location data to curb the coronavirus pandemic.