Apple and Google are beginning to track people's location data throughout SK

Technical reports revealed that Apple and Google are beginning to track people's location data via their smartphones, in order to track the commitment of people around the world to social divergence procedures during the emerging Corona Virus pandemic.

Two days ago, the two companies launched two sites, the first from Apple entitled (Mobility Trends Reports), and the second for Google company (COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports).

The two sites aim to use the map data collected from smartphones, to find out the percentage of people committed to applying social divergence procedures in every country in the world, to reduce the spread of the Coronavirus.

The Apple site is the most obvious, as anonymous data are pulled from the route requests in Apple maps, installed on all iPhones, compared to the previous use to reveal changes in the percentage of people driving cars, or walking or traveling in one day, Then display those requests in a graph.

Google provides on its site almost the same data, but the view differs, as there is no illustration, but you need to click on the option (Download PDF) next to the country, state or city that you want to look at the navigation data in, and here will be the data that It gets more detailed than Apple data.

Amid questions about the privacy that individuals hope for, both Apple and Google confirm that they collected this data, taking into account the privacy of the user.

Apple says: The data that is sent from user devices to the mapping service is associated with random identifiers, so Apple does not have a profile of your own about your movements and the searches you make.

For its part, Google says: It does not provide personal identification information, such as: geographical location, contacts or movement of the individual at any time, as visions in these reports arise from data collected and anonymous from the Location History setting in Google Maps and services. The other, which is turned off by default.

New security service that competes with VPN

And the American company Google announced the launch of a new security service designed to allow safe remote access to the internal systems of companies and institutions without using VPN applications or networks.

The company said that this service comes due to an increase in the number of employees working at home during the closings associated with the emerging Coronavirus and companies discovering how to absorb the workforce remotely.

The service relies on the "cloud" system and allows employees to securely access the company's internal web applications from any device or anywhere, so that the new service aims to provide safe and fast access to browser-based applications.

The service relies on a system that Google originally designed for internal use almost a decade ago, and the company says in a blog post that it uses an approach that typically requires some kind of additional authentication before granting access to an outside source.

The company pointed out that VPNs are a challenge at the present time as companies try to adopt a huge number in a short period of time, and users who are not used to dealing with VPNs can face great difficulty in using them.

The BeyondCorp Remote Access service was designed to deal with such scenarios, and Google has been trying to simplify the features of accessing its network since 2011, which has resulted in the production of this service, which makes it easy to set specific access policies for a narrow group of users for each internal application.

The service avoids the need for (VPN) through a design that includes a database for each device authorized to communicate, a security certificate installed on this device, and integration with the human resources database that includes information about user names and group memberships.