Report urges EU policymakers to encourage businesses to share mobility data

A new report released by the Center for Data Innovation urges EU policymakers to encourage businesses to share mobility data by implementing policies that provide firms with regulatory clarity, financial incentives, and technical resources to share this type of data.

Businesses to share mobility data

Aggregating and anonymizing data about consumers’ travel patterns can reveal valuable insights into human mobility and social interaction. Researchers can analyze this mobility data to address societal challenges, like disease spread, urban functioning, forced migration, climate change, and disaster response.

“Access to mobility data is difficult for researchers to obtain because it typically rests in the hands of private firms that face significant legal, financial, and practical challenges to sharing this data,” said Hodan Omaar, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Data Innovation and author of the report. “Yet this data provides valuable information on movement patterns that can help address questions in the public interest. EU policymakers should make it easier for interested parties to use it for the common good.”

Mobility Data

Population censuses and travel history surveys have historically served as mobility data sources for researchers exploring population movements. But censuses and surveys are costly to implement, limited in scope and granularity, and ineffective in situations where timely information is needed. Because of that, researchers have turned toward mobility data from call records and mobile apps that provide location-based services to fill in the gaps in human mobility patterns.

Highlighting an important use case, the report shows that researchers have used mobility data to track the movement of people from Ukraine after Russia invaded the country in February, which represents the fastest and largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II. Using mobility data from Meta’s Data for Good program, researchers have been able to see where Ukrainian refugees are moving from and to in close to real-time, enabling a range of policymakers and response agencies to prioritize the allocation of resources to locations where they are most needed.

The report also explains several ways in which researchers can use mobility data for social good. First, it can play a descriptive role, helping researchers quantitatively understand and communicate trends and patterns in information, like through data visualizations. Second, this data can aid researchers in predicting the likelihood of some event happening in the future. Finally, mobility data can play a prescriptive role, helping researchers examine the possible consequences of different choices and decide the best course of action.

Recommendations from the Center for Data Innovation to EU Policymakers

The Center for Data Innovation offers several recommendations for how EU policymakers can support unlocking private sector mobility data for social good:

• Revise the Data Governance Act (DGA) to allow private sector firms to be listed in national registers of recognized data altruism organizations.
• Pilot a common European data space for human mobility that researchers can use for social good.
• Issue a Horizon challenge to encourage researchers to use the data space for specific problems in the public interest.
• Proactively support experimentation of methods that use mobility data for social good.
• Draft a common EU approach for the use of mobility data in emergency contexts to support future public health and humanitarian crisis exit strategies.
• Pursue global partnerships in mobility data.“To maximize social good from reusing privately-collected mobility data, the interests and behaviour of three different groups must be aligned: individuals whose data is being collected, companies who collect the data for commercial purposes, and researchers and the general public who benefit from accessing the data for social good purposes,” said Omaar. “The role of government should be to coordinate the behaviour of agents to optimize to a collective objective by setting policies and providing resources and incentives that induce them to act cooperatively.”