A St. George Island woman was taken aback to learn Franklin County and the Florida Department of Health are using data to track the movement of people.
Brenda Karlin, the state grassroots coordinator for the Convention of States, discovered that the county and state were using data from Unacast to study movement. Karlin said she wanted to learn more following an April 9 Franklin County Commission meeting.
“I am a concerned citizen and resident of Franklin County,” Karlin told Florida Business Daily. “There’s not enough information.”
She said since the pandemic started the issue of tracking has been discussed on both social media and in traditional media outlets.
“I perked up when I heard in this meeting the health department is tracking,” Karlin said. “And how are they enforcing this?”
She said she fears government tracking the population, and also wonders if governments are using the crisis as an opportunity to obtain more funding and authority. Some of the information gathered and compiled could be used for that purpose, Karlin said.
“Models are being used to justify getting resources from other counties, state and federal government, I question those,” she said.
Karlin also wonders if Franklin County officials are trying to find federal dollars to keep open George E. Weems Memorial Hospital, a nonprofit community health facility in Apalachicola. It has struggled to cover its costs in recent years.
“There’s lots of politics involved,” she said. “It is a cash cow. They’re using all this to acquire resources to prop up this hospital.”
Karlin also has a basic distrust of the government “dictating to the private sector, dictating to the community.” That doesn’t mean she thinks the pandemic is fake.
“I think the virus is real,” she said. “I think our reaction is over the top.”
The number of deaths does not justify such extreme measures that are being taken across the country, Karlin said, adding, “They seem to be taking liberty from liberty. We are all being told to tow the line to this. How do we stop doing this and get our community functioning again?”
KarlinKarlin said she believes there is a minimal chance of losing your life — and a much greater chance of losing individual freedom and rights.
“That’s not the way America operates,” she said. “That’s not the way the world operates.
Unacast, which was started in 2014, describes itself as a human mobility data company. It has offices in New York City and Oslo, Norway.
It collects anonymous device location data, map data and strategic intelligence for retail, real estate, tourism, transportation, and marketing industries. Its flagship product, “The Real World Graph,” provides innovative solutions and insights to operational challenges for companies of any size or shape.
Unacast was not paid to provide the information to the Florida Department of Health. In fact, anyone can access the information, which summarizes phone data from a county. It does not track individual phones, according to Unacast.
The social distancing scoreboard and other tools developed for the Covid-19 Toolkit create a social indexing score by combining data from tens of millions of anonymous mobile phones and their interactions with one another. The company then extrapolates the results to the population level.
The company follows privacy guidelines established under the General Data Privacy Regulation in the European Union and the European Economic Area (EEA), and the California Consumer Privacy Act, which created new consumer rights involving access to, deletion of and sharing of personal information collected by firms such as Unacast.
Unacast co-founder and CEO Thomas Walle said it merely wants to provide data to anyone who needs it during this crisis.
“While much is still unknown about COVID-19, it’s clear social distancing is widely agreed to be an effective way of slowing the spread, and a containment strategy advised by both the World Health Organization and the CDC,” he said on the company website. “We have seen this work well in China, where the outbreak originated, and also in places like Singapore and South Korea.”
“Our goal in developing this and our COVID-19 Toolkit is to empower organizations to unearth reliable and valuable information to guide critical decision-making and planning in relation to COVID-19 containment,” Walle told Florida Business Daily. “We are updating the Scorecard and enhancing this COVID-19 Toolkit to provide the most timely and accurate information possible, with the hope of ultimately saving lives.”
Madeline Ngo, the firm’s head of products and insight, offered an update on the Social Distancing Scoreboard on the Unacast website.
“In the age of COVID-19, reducing visits to non-essential businesses and limiting social interactions is an important and oft-repeated message coming from municipalities and government agencies,” Ngo wrote. “But equally important is knowing whether citizens are responding to that message. This is the core value of our social distancing scoreboard: enabling policymakers, researchers and health officials to measure the efficacy of their efforts.
“And so far, we are seeing our efforts bear fruit — we’ve been contacted by government officials and health policy experts at the local, state, and federal levels expressing great enthusiasm for our aggregated analysis and partnering with us to make their response to COVID-19 even better and smarter. And we’re sharing here what we’re sharing with our public partners: our scoreboard will see continuous improvements as long as the virus continues to spread.”
The Florida Department of Health is promoting social distancing, according to spokeswoman Jessie Wagner Pippin.
“In Gulf and Franklin counties, we have been encouraging the social distancing message by sharing it in a way that allows every demographic to have the potential to receive it,” Pippin said in a statement from the department. “Even during Hurricane Michael, we realized unique messaging was needed to truly communicate fundamental information to our community. By utilizing email, social media, digital messaging kiosks and text alert systems, we believe our communities are not left in the dark.”
Digital kiosks are at the main grocery stored in two counties with COVID-19-specific messaging on testing sites, social distancing messaging, hand washing, local closures and more.
“We have also set up a local alert system that allows anyone to text GULFCOVID to 888777,” Pippin said. “Since the creation of the GULFCOVID alert system March 23, there has been a steady increase of participants and it currently has a total of 1,169 subscribers. These daily alerts include a link to our Gulf COVID-19 daily update that includes local and state announcements and the most updated information for our community.”
The briefings include updates on the Unacast social distancing scoreboard rating, and people are sharing it on social media, with the message to “Aim for A.”
”This tool has allowed the community to continue to be aware of social distancing, even around the holiday, by placing a measurable outcome to our actions,” she said. “We can all do our part to impact the score which leads to the larger goal of keeping our community safe. Before the holidays, Gulf County was the highest-ranked county in the state with an A and has since dropped to a B.”