Data sharing and collaborations with Telco data during the COVID-19 pandemic: A Vodafone case study

With the outbreak of COVID-19 across Europe, anonymized telecommunications data provides a key insight into population level mobility and assessing the impact and effectiveness of containment measures. Vodafone’s response across its global footprint was fast and delivered key new metrics for the pandemic that have proven to be useful for a number of external entities. Cooperation with national governments and supra-national entities to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic was a key part of Vodafone’s response, and in this article the different methodologies developed are analyzed, as well as the key collaborations established in this context. In this article we also analyze the regulatory challenges found, and how these can pose a risk of the full benefits of these insights not being harnessed, despite clear and efficient Privacy and Ethics assessments to ensure individual safety and data privacy.