San Francisco-based SafeGraph is one of the private companies helping California governments document the pandemic’s impact across their communities, how well stay-at-home orders are working and the extent to which residents are venturing out again. Spokesperson Nick Singh explained what the company offers and how it’s working with state and local. Among the takeaways:
• The company, Singh told Techwire, is a data company and as such, it sells data sets — working with around 5 million U.S. businesses. Per the company website, it offers visitor analytics, foot-traffic counts and demographic insights from business listing and building footprint data that covers more than 6 million points of interest in the U.S. and Canada, including retail and airports. But since the pandemic took hold, SafeGraph has stood up the COVID-19 Data Consortium, making its data available free to more than 1,000 academic groups, governments and nonprofits. These include the city of Los Angeles, the consolidated city-county of San Francisco and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office, its Chief of Staff Ross Epstein said via email. Other California partners include Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
• The data it makes available isn’t based on personally identifiable information; rather, it’s anonymized and aggregated, and founded on location data collected by mobile apps. It’s not data from cell carriers, but “from individual apps that have a reason to collect data,” Singh said, including health, navigation and safety apps. And it’s all “opted in” data that is California Consumer Privacy Act-compliant. SafeGraph’s data set of places is updated monthly, while other data sets are updated more frequently. The information they provide helps departments and agencies understand whether residents are staying home, where businesses are hardest-hit and how reopening might go forward; it’s not being used for contact tracing.
“It’s all about aggregated anonymized insights at the neighborhood level or at the business level. This is data for good that we’re giving out, and I think it’s meaningfully making a difference already,” Singh said.
• Jeanne Holm, Los Angeles’ new chief data officer and, before that, senior technology adviser to Mayor Eric Garcetti, confirmed to Techwire that the city is using “the anonymized data on mobility.”
“This type of data helps us to understand if people are staying safer at home and comparative information over time about how many people are moving around,” Holm said via email. An April 13 Daily Data Summary featured SafeGraph mobility data and revealed the “percentage of people staying home jumped significantly during the weekend of (March 14) coinciding with closures of various public locations.” Garcetti told Vanity Fair in March that he relies closely on data, including “cell phone data and apps movement that people got to me.”
• The pandemic could be a pivot point for public-sector data use, Singh said, pointing out that while historically data collection and use has proven difficult for virtually all types of entities, “we seem to be in a place in the government where people are comfortable using their own data and now they’re looking at outside data sets … .”
“We can see that governments are becoming more data-driven and are looking to data to drive policy, and I think that’s a good thing to see,” Singh said.
