Introducing Global Movement data for mobility insights | by Mapbox

Mapbox Movement is a live dataset generated from 30+ billion daily location updates and drawn from the underlying data panel of more than 600 million monthly active users of Mapbox-powered apps worldwide. This data set captures significant mobile device activity aggregated into geographic swaths with a resolution of 100 meters (roughly one city block) and multiple Map Grid boundaries. Use cases include retail analysis and location selection, rapid response to disasters, peak hour POI tracking, and transportation planning. Movement Data is now available in public beta for all Mapbox developers.

Movement data offers several key advantages: unprecedented global coverage and consistency, privacy guarantees, and a robust QA process that ensures high-quality data for use in your applications.

To drive innovation and enable Mapbox customers around the world to unlock the wide range of use cases we offer Movement Data for 8 months (January to August 2020) at no cost to Mapbox users for 3 main geographies: United States, Germany, and United Kingdom.

“Data provided by Mapbox on activity levels in specific local areas, combined with a range of other data from additional providers, including mobility and displacement rates and underlying social vulnerabilities, helps Direct Relief understand how local people need help. relief from the impact of a disaster may change their behavior and location on a daily basis. The combination of these factors is becoming increasingly important in how we model the real-time impact of disasters on populations and the scale and scope of humanitarian medical assistance that may be required.”

—Andrew Schroeder, Vice President of Research at Direct Relief, a leader in GIS and data science-based humanitarian relief and global response

One Move dataset for the entire world

With thousands of Mapbox-powered mobile apps covering nearly every densely populated metro area in the world, Movement data is your source for mobility analysis in any geographic area. The Movement Activity Index is updated daily for every 100m spatial grid in our global market pool. This relative indicator of human movement is used to compare activity levels across space and time in any given geography. Movement data is available in 8 markets (US, UK, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, India, Japan) and may be available in additional markets on request with a 3 week lead time.

Privacy first

Choosing Movement data means choosing worry-free data sets that respect individual privacy and eliminate any regulatory concerns. Other data sets collect device-level advertising identifiers and tag user location data with personally identifying attributes — with attempts to “anonymize” only in post-processing. However, various investigations including recent research from the NYTimes have revealed how this type of data can easily be “re-identified” and produce worrying results. Mapbox has a rich history of respecting our users’ privacy, and the Mapbox Movement has been built with those same principles at the forefront. Mobility data collected from the Mapbox SDK is anonymized on the device and aggregated in the cloud. No identifiers or other personally identifiable information is collected or stored as part of our telemetry, and location events are aggregated into minimum-sized geospatial tiles with strict privacy thresholds.

Simple but powerful data

Mapbox is responsible for data generation, processing and validation making it possible to debug at all layers of the data stack and ensuring reliability, consistency and quality suitable for use in most applications. Other providers sell data collected from unreliable third-party sources, aggregated in inconsistent ways, and produced without adequate data quality checks. All of our Movement data is first party data sourced from Mapbox powered applications. We have full visibility into our data pipeline and we use this context to continuously measure and calibrate changes in mobile device usage, resulting in superior and reliable mobility data sets.

Movement data is updated daily and monthly, and delivered as a flat file dataset with a simple schema — ready to be imported and processed with common geospatial tools including Tableau, PostGIS, or Kepler. In addition to global Traffic Data and 4 million curated Boundaries, Mapbox offers a complete suite of data products to analyze mobility patterns anywhere in the world.

Download today’s sample data

All Mapbox users can now download daily movement data for 8 months from January to August 2020. Download a sample of your Movement data today and check out the Motion FAQ and documentation to get started.