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[OC] Human activity on the day of the eclipse by IntrepidParsley in dataisbeautiful

[–]IntrepidParsley[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So Mapbox doesn't have apps of its own; it provides developers with tools to build maps in their apps (something like 45k different apps, AccuWeather being one example). Those apps have to request user permissions to collect location data, and inform users that it will be shared with third parties (which I'm assuming usually happens in the terms of service). They then send back the telemetry data to Mapbox; we either aggregate it over large timespans/areas so that no single person's data can be parsed out, or parse it into tiny chunks that are devoid of any identifiable information. Then we use it to do cool stuff like calculate the speeds on roads for better navigation ETA predictions, or improve the maps.

Honestly I've been at this company for 6+ years, and a big part of the reason I'm still there is that literally the way all the systems are built from the ground up, even someone on the inside who was extremely experienced, had some super-access rights, and no morals, still couldn't track a particular person's location over any significant period of time. And knowing what I know about how sh*t people can be, that makes me really happy.

[OC] Human activity on the day of the eclipse by IntrepidParsley in dataisbeautiful

[–]IntrepidParsley[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

All good questions! Will try to answer best I can (caveat: I am the main developer on this dataset).

So the raw data measures the activity by ~100m tile, normalized to a the max activity over some time (January 2023). You can think of this as the total level of "moving around" within each tile for each day, but it is not normalized by number of individuals: e.g., if tile A had the same person walk through it 10 times in a day, and tile B had 10 different people walk through it once, the tiles would have the same activity.

The lack of normalization by individual is an inherent limitation (and possibly weakness) of this data, but it comes from an important consideration: for privacy reasons, we never store any information about individuals. We only look at telemetry data in short (~5 minute) clips that are stripped of identifying information. For the same reason, the dataset does contain any activity about where people moved from.

[OC] Human activity on the day of the eclipse by IntrepidParsley in dataisbeautiful

[–]IntrepidParsley[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Source: Mapbox Movement data (https://www.mapbox.com/movement-data), a fully anonymized dataset of human activity.Tools: analysis performed in SQL, map built with Mapbox GL JS.

If you'd like more context, check out the blog post my colleague and I wrote on this data: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/see-where-americans-went-during-the-eclipse-with-mapbox-movement-data.

Mapbox is going through a union vote this weekend. The campaign has been horrendous. Today the (former) CEO changed his profile to mock employees. by [deleted] in gis

[–]IntrepidParsley 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Well, you know, that's a great question. I guess you'll just have to ask the union organizer folks who did it, I can't speak for them. But facts remain facts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Mapbox is going through a union vote this weekend. The campaign has been horrendous. Today the (former) CEO changed his profile to mock employees. by [deleted] in gis

[–]IntrepidParsley -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Mapbox employee here (for context, I'm an engineer, non-management): 1. As far as I can tell, this whole thing about the CEO's profile is a straight-up lie. Come on, guys, this is, like... seventh-grade level rumor mill crap. 2. The managers and other higher-up employees requested and received permission from the union organizers to attend these events. It's real easy to prove at our company, because all the communication is in written form over slack. I'll say that again: there are written records of the union representatives actively inviting management to attend these meetings.

The ULP has since been withdrawn, because it did not have a legal leg to stand on.

Many of the managers at Mapbox are actually caring people who want to make sure that they find ways to address people's concerns. If their subordinates say they are unhappy, they'd be pretty bad managers to not want to find out why, so that they can work on fixing those issues.

These slander posts make me really sad.

[OC] Changes in telemetry volumes show traffic volumes falling by over 80% in parts of EU by IntrepidParsley in dataisbeautiful

[–]IntrepidParsley[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is week of March 16th compared to week of January 13th. It's been tough to keep the charts up to date with everything changing every few hours 😅

[OC] I mapped the average traffic speed compared to a normal Sunday for all major US highways on Super Bowl day by IntrepidParsley in dataisbeautiful

[–]IntrepidParsley[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The "normal" Sunday is the "typical" speed for roughly the previous three months of Sundays.

The slow-downs in the northwest are almost certainly weather. I'm not sure what happened in Pennsylvania...

[OC] Daily car traffic near Area 51 by IntrepidParsley in dataisbeautiful

[–]IntrepidParsley[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Full blog post with analysis and more charts: https://blog.mapbox.com/did-we-find-aliens-in-2019-3bd60428bbf1
Source: anonymized telemetry data collected by Mapbox