Unacast, an analytics company using location data from a variety of apps, debuts a Social Distancing Scoreboard to grade how US citizens are adapting by region
or not. Data from tens of millions of smartphones grades counties & states by how much people are staying put. Washington, DC gets an A Wyoming gets an F See your county https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Governor Phil Murphy / @govmurphy : Great work New Jersey! We are in the top five nationwide for social distancing! This IS WORKING. Keep doing your part and we will #FlattenTheCurve. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Stuart A. Thompson / @stuartathompson : We can actually see how social distancing is spreading across the US. Here it is in 2,700+ counties. It's happening everywhere, but some areas are lagging behind. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Will Strafach / @chronic : it's intriguing to see things like this framed as a public interest type story, without focusing on the fact that tens of millions of people's locations are being unwittingly tracked through their phones. https://twitter.com/... Asher Langton / @asherlangton : tl;dr: this is based on change in distance traveled, which seems like a poor metric when comparing rural to urban regions. https://twitter.com/... Nathan Bernhardt / @jonbernhardt : it's not the worst thing about the new panopticon, but surely the most annoying thing about it is its ability to pump out context-free clickbait maps. I wonder if people in Wyoming have to travel the same distance to essential services as people in DC, or if they cluster as much https://twitter.com/... Ted Lieu / @tedlieu : This is a stupid clash. At end of 15-day period, many Americans still won't want to fly, go on cruise ship, sit next to stranger at movie theater, or eat at crowded restaurant. It's this behavior change that will keep economy slow, even if government restrictions are lifted. https://twitter.com/... JosephKnish / @joeyknish22 : How is this GPS cell movement data obtained legally? Have seen a couple studies using this type of tracking data. I see the source is @DescartesLabs. Would love to know how this is acquired. https://twitter.com/... Andrew Turley / @casio_juarez : Quick reminder that we live in the middle of a privatized surveillance state. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Gina / @ginadivittorio : Taking an average of distance moved isn't really a great measure of if people are social distancing or not, when I lived in Wyoming I was about 25 miles from the nearest pharmacy, and 12 miles from the nearest post office. Existing in Wyoming is basically social distancing. https://twitter.com/... Matthew Cooper / @mattizcoop : One of those stories that's both “Good news!” and “Good God.” Smartphone data reveal which Americans are social distancing (and not) https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Rose Eveleth / @roseveleth : love a good surveillance graphic!!!!! https://twitter.com/... Rrix / @rrrrrrrix : this is the same privately-collected, sold-for-profit and now publicly-held data that people (myself included) were livid about last month. this ambient data is being collected all the time — not just during this time of need. https://twitter.com/... Isaac Stone Fish / @isaacstonefish : I find this incredibly disturbing from a civil liberties perspective. Also, DC is more than 1500 times more densely populated than Wyoming, so of course people would need to move around less. https://twitter.com/... Breanne Deppisch / @breanne_dep : A new company, @Unacast, just released a “Social Distancing Scoreboard” that collects smartphone GPS data to “grade” counties based on how many of its residents are following social distancing guidelines: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Geoffrey A. Fowler / @geoffreyfowler : @washingtonpost Here's who's been staying put — and not — in the D.C. area. Efforts to track public health during the coronavirus are a reminder of the many ways our smartphones reveal our personal lives. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Shira Ovide / @shiraovide : Your periodic reminder that companies you've never heard of have location information from our smartphones. We did not consent to this. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Nicholas Kristof / @nickkristof : This is remarkable visual reporting showing how social distancing is reducing movement — and slowing the economy — to different degrees across the country. Seattle has stopped; Alabama hasn't. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
A week after a researcher showed how Facebook's anonymized colocation maps could reveal distancing habits, Unacast is scaling the same idea commercially: its Social Distancing Scoreboard grades more than 2,700 US counties and all states using location pings from tens of millions of smartphones already collected by everyday apps. The raw material was exposed by the New York Times' reporting that [[a:949089|merely carrying a phone to a political rally can tie its owner to the event in commercial datasets]].
The scoreboard lands in a policy vacuum: with no federal compliance data, governors are adopting private-sector grades as their own messaging — New Jersey's Phil Murphy immediately touted the state's top-five ranking as proof 'this IS WORKING.'
First-order effects
- Governors like Murphy gain a ready-made public scorecard to pressure residents, while low-ranked states such as Wyoming get an F that frames them publicly as laggards.
- Journalists including Geoffrey Fowler flag the privacy trade-off: an analytics firm is now publishing behavioral grades derived from apps most users never knew were tracking them.
Second-order effects
- Rival geospatial players like Descartes Labs face pressure to ship their own pandemic dashboards, turning crisis analytics into a competitive market overnight.
- The metric itself draws fire — grading 'change in distance traveled' penalizes rural states where driving is structural, forcing anyone reusing the methodology to defend urban-rural comparability.
Third-order effects
- Government adoption follows the private template: internal documents later show the CDC bought location data from millions of phones to check COVID rule compliance, including in the Navajo Nation — a direct institutionalization of what Unacast prototyped.
- If crisis-era acceptance holds, the collectors, aggregators, and marketplaces of the multi-billion-dollar location-data industry gain a durable public-sector customer base, with privacy law lagging behind practice.
The trend: Emergency public-health measurement is converting commercial smartphone-location surveillance from a marketing byproduct into a standing instrument of government policy.