Google COVID-19 Search Trends Symptoms Dataset: Anonymization Process Description

Akim Kumok
Chaitanya Kamath
Charlotte Stanton
Damien Desfontaines
Evgeniy Gabrilovich
Gerardo Flores
Gregory Alexander Wellenius
Ilya Eckstein
John S. Davis
Katie Everett
Krishna Kumar Gadepalli
Rayman Huang
Shailesh Bavadekar
Thomas Ludwig Roessler
Venky Ramachandran
Yael Mayer
Arxiv.org, N/A (2020)

Abstract

This report describes the aggregation and anonymization process applied to the initial version of COVID-19 Search Trends symptoms dataset, a publicly available dataset that shows aggregated, anonymized trends in Google searches for symptoms (and some related topics). The anonymization process is designed to protect the daily search activity of every user with \varepsilon-differential privacy for \varepsilon = 1.68.