Abstract
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and associated measures implemented have rapidly changed how people move about and behave in society. Utilizing data on people’s mobility could provide unique and valuable insights to governments and institutions to better manage the crisis. These entities, however, have not traditionally had access to, nor the experience of applying, continuous anonymized and aggregated data on people mobility. This article aims to show how the Public Health Agency in Sweden successfully collaborated with a Nordic Telecoms operator to make use of such data during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, it investigates how the collaboration started, approaches used to go from data to insight, outcomes and impact, and lessons learned on both sides. Telia, the largest telecom operator in the Nordics, had an existing product commercially available that provided anonymized and aggregated insights about people’s movement. Several challenges existed within Telia as it was the first time worldwide a collaboration with a Public Health Agency would take place and social benefits had to be weighed against commercial and reputational risks. The hypothesis at the beginning of the pandemic was that the solution could be adapted to fit the needs of policymakers and the internal challenges could be overcome, while providing a meaningful contribution to the fight against the virus. The results show that it is possible to both form a mutually beneficial collaboration between a telecom operator and a public institution, and to make use of mobility data in evidence-based policymaking without compromising applicable personal data protection laws.
Highlights
Policy Significance Statement To successfully combat the COVID-19 pandemic, and potential future pandemics, the application of anonymous and aggregated mobility data can play an important role, such as suggested in recent research (Iacus et al, 2020a; Kraemer et al, 2020; Santamaria et al, 2020) by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission
The data itself must be safe to use from a privacy standpoint and must be representative for the whole population. Such data can be provided by mobile operators, and by forging a close partnership between public institutions and mobile operators, beneficial outcomes can be achieved
In Sweden, the public became acutely aware of the COVID-19 potential impact around the time of the popular spring break in the end of February/early March 2020
Summary
Policy Significance Statement To successfully combat the COVID-19 pandemic, and potential future pandemics, the application of anonymous and aggregated mobility data can play an important role, such as suggested in recent research (Iacus et al, 2020a; Kraemer et al, 2020; Santamaria et al, 2020) by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. It became clear to Telia that Anonymous and Aggregated Mobility Data in the commercially available product Telia Crowd Insights (Telia Company, n.d.-b) could potentially be of use to authorities to support their decision making.
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