New Stats NZ start up sells location data to government agencies eager to understand population movements

Tuesday, 1 October 2019

This video shows the hourly activity of the population across Wellington. If an area has an increase of population since the previous hour then it highlights as red. If it has a decrease of population since the previous hour it highlights as blue.

A start up within Statistics New Zealand is using telco data to better track population movements across the country.

Data Ventures was launched in November 2017 as a data brokerage and commercial arm of Stats NZ. Essentially, it gets data sets from private organisations and turns them into useful products to sell to government agencies.

After several delays, the team of nine staff, including two seconded from Statistics New Zealand, has finally gone public with its first pilot project, Population Density. Using location data sourced from Spark and Vodafone, Population Density shows the number of people per suburb per hour.

Knowing how many people are in an area at hourly intervals allows councils to monitor, and plan for, tourism peaks and troughs, says executive director Drew Broadley.

Central city data shows Kiwis travelling to and from work each day

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This video shows the hourly activity of the population across Christchurch. If an area has an increase of population since the previous hour then it highlights as red. If it has a decrease of population since the previous hour it highlights as blue

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'With some summer destinations, having that sort of insight is huge. It's literally the difference between toilets flushing and not.'

Large events, such as rugby games and concerts, that show tens of thousands of people leaving an area quickly, can also provide models for emergency planning.

'So rather than using actual emergencies you can prepare yourself with planned events.'

Transport agencies already use location data from GPS devices to track how vehicles move on main routes

December patterns clearly show Christmas shopping trends, and lower numbers of people heading to central city areas during winter hint at the impact of the flu season.

Given issues with last year's online Census and controversial use of personal location data overseas, Broadley says while he'd 'never assure there's no risk', public trust is front of mind for Data Ventures. It plans to build a repository of use cases so people can see how the data is being used.

He emphasises the difference between the cell tower data used by Population Density, and GPS location data.

'We can't track individuals' movements,' he says. Cell tower location data includes — within a much larger radius than GPS data — all cellphones with SIM cards, not just those connected to the internet.

'There's good penetration of mobile devices across all social demographics. A big thing for me is, we want to make sure there's no lack of representation.'

Data Ventures has worked with the Office of the Privacy Commission to make sure it's protecting people's privacy, he adds.

'The [Office of the Privacy Commissioner] has said that what we're doing is a great example of how to deal with mobile data.'

Telco 2degrees says it 'briefly' engaged with Data Ventures to understand how its network information could help government departments. However, chief of corporate affairs Mat Bolland in a statement says: 'We're recently decided not to take the pilot further, because we needed more clarity on things like the potential commercialisation and ongoing requests.'

Broadley says Data Ventures hasn't ruled out private partnerships down the line. 'It's a fine balance between what we could do and what we should do.'