EU Proximity Tracking Platform Launched

The Pan European Privacy Protecting Proximity Tracing initiative aims to create a platform enabling governments or health agencies to harness mobile location data to identify people exposed to pandemic agents such as Covid-19, while observing European Union data protection laws. 

The initiative includes 130 data scientists from eight countries, led by Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms. 

The project has developed source code that can be used to build applications that notify people when they have been exposed to a person known to have Covid-19. 

It might be worth noting that health officials and governments in Europe have sought help from telcos and app providers for ways of using location data to help with pandemic response, including tracking movement, in key ways. Prior to the pandemic, such tracking might have seemed quite an invasion of privacy, at the very least. 

The Trace Together app in Singapore is a related example of such proximity trading. The U.S. federal government is working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to create a portal including phone geolocation data to help predict outbreaks. 

Google Maps now is being used to produce Community Mobility Reports, using anonymized data,  showing how busy retail locations are, in the wake of pandemic-driven stay-at-home policies. Many health-related apps have been developed to help track, test or treat Covid-19 patients. 

All that should raise one obvious question: what is the value of mobile operator location data?  Though location data has been touted as a key advantage for mobile operators offering advertising, for example, it also now is quite clear that device suppliers and app suppliers also can supply such data, enriched in many cases by detail on the types of locations visited. 

In the coming era where artificial intelligence is applied to most processes, ownership of data stores will be directly linked to creation of value. In that regard, location data owned by mobile service providers should be valuable. But just how valuable is not yet clear, especially since other entities, especially device and app providers, also have location knowledge.