iPhone map data released by Apple to track whether people are obeying coronavirus lockdown

Data shows dramatic reduction in number of journeys

Priest-in-Charge Angie Smith, uses her smartphone to film the sunrise whilst live-broadcasting an Easter Sunday service to her congregation at dawn, from the churchyard of Old St. Mary's Church in Hartley Wintney, west of London, on April 12, 2020 (ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP via Getty Images)

Apple has released data from its Maps app to track whether people are complying with coronavirus lockdowns.

The data shows whether its users are still requesting directions from their iPhones, and so can be used to see how much people are travelling compared to before the lockdowns came into effect.

It shows a dramatic reduction in the number of people using driving, walking and transport directions to get around, suggesting that stay-in-place orders and other rules to stop the spread of coronavirus are working.

In the San Francisco Bay area, for instance, requests for driving directions are down 70 per cent, and people looking for transit directions have dropped 84 per cent. In New York, transit requests were down 89 per cent.

Apple is updating the data daily, to compare it with a date in January, before most measures were in place, it said.

The information has been made publicly available on a devoted website, as well as being given to officials co-ordinating government responses. Google has done the same with its similar dataset, saying it had made the decision to allow the public to see the kind of data it would be passing to authorities.

All of the information is aggregated, so that nothing about individual users can be learnt from the data. Apple has stressed the role of privacy in the development of its Maps app, which does not use a login or location tracking in the same way as rivals such as Google.

The Apple data is only generated when a user requests directions. In contrast, Google's location data is collected all the time if a user has the location tracking feature turned on.

It is also less granular than the information offered by Google, which is collecting information from 131 different countries. Apple is also only offering relative numbers, rather than collating the absolute number of requests or speciifc amounts of people.