Replacing discontinued Big Tech mobility reports: a penetration-based analysis

People mobility data sets played a role during the COVID-19 pandemic in assessing the impact of lockdown measures and correlating mobility with pandemic trends. Two global data sets were Apple’s Mobility Trends Reports and Google’s Community Mobility Reports. The former is no longer available online, while the latter is no longer updated since October 2022. Thus, new products are required. To establish a lower bound on data set penetration guaranteeing high adherence between new products and the Big Tech products, an independent mobility data set based on 3.8 million smartphone trajectories is analysed to compare its information content with that of the Google data set. This lower bound is determined to be around 10−4 (1 trajectory every 10,000 people) suggesting that relatively small data sets are suitable for replacing Big Tech reports.