Facebook will offer location and friendship data of its users to the Covid-19 investigation - La Provincia
Facebookwill provide new types ofanonymous dataof its users, including possible contacts with people close to their location and their friends, to help experts and institutions investigating the spread of the pandemic ofcoronavirus.
As the company has announced in a statement, Facebook has expanded its programData for Good, which pursues social uses with its data, and which already provides information on user movements to researchers and organizations that combat Covid-19.
Now the company has addedthree new data types to your programdata for health experts, with the aim of "helping to inform efforts to predict the disease and to take action onprevention"This is anonymized aggregated data to protect the privacy of users.
The first of the tools shows researchers theprobability that people in a given area have been in contact with others, through patterns that are used to predict possible local infections.
Another function measures themobility trends in a region,showing through a curve if its inhabitants stay at home during quarantine or if they visit other places, which can guide preventive measures.
Finally, Facebook has compileda social connection indexIt shows the degree of friendships of users in a region who come from other areas or other countries, which can help epidemiologists to discern where the virus is most likely to spread.
In addition, the company has collaborated with a study prepared by Carnegie Mellon University (United States) and will begin to disseminate a survey among its US users, with questions such as a self-diagnosis of COVID-19, to help monitor and predict the spread of the illness.
