These data have been collected and supplied by Huq Ltd. and comprise of records for the period July 2016 to October 2020. The data contain aggregated geolocated activity counts derived from mobile phone app use across Great Britain.

Mobile phone applications seek user’s consent for recording and storing the mobile device’s location when the app is in use. Activity counts are derived from these locations as the sum of distinct devices per grid cell per day. These data can be used as proxy for estimating activity levels and footfall across the UK.

These aggregate data were created from record level data which comprised individual phone IDs, and multiple entries for each mobile device if it is used multiple times for one app or the user accesses multiple apps. Thus, the following data cleaning and aggregation process has been used to create the activity counts:

1. Cleaning: Daily records comprise unique device ID, time-stamp and location of each entry collected by any app. The time-stamp is reformatted as a single daily date attribute.
2. Spatial linkage to OSGB grid: After turning the daily data-frames into spatial objects, the files are joined to the 1km x 1km OSGB grid, and each impression is attributed a grid cell ID corresponding to its latitude and longitude.
3. Creation of activity counts: Activity counts are created following the previous steps by counting the number of unique device IDs per grid cell per date. This removes multiple appearances of the same device (one device may collect multiple impressions through different apps or due to frequent usage). The final activity count corresponds to the number of unique devices within a 1km square for that day.
4. Output: The output comprises cleaned aggregation counts for each grid cell and day

N.B. More detail on how the data was collected and coverage is available if requesting for this detail in your initial application purpose, or if contacting us by email once you have made your initial application and received the form. Applicants would need to sign a non-disclosure agreement before accessing this detail, and such as request will significantly increase the time for data delivery. You can, of course, make a full application for the data without first receiving this collection/ coverage metadata.

Content

These data are provided at 1km x 1km OSGB Grid cells.

Activity counts of 1-10 devices are masked and replaced by “*” in the database, as low counts present potentially identifiable information.

For detailed description of the columns contained within the data, see the Variable Dictionary; and for an overview of the characteristics of the data, see the Data Summary. These files can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.

Quality, Representation and Bias

Excellent quality and coverage for major towns and cities. The data may be less complete for smaller settlements or more rural areas. Data are subject to suppression of potentially disclosive low counts as detailed above. Huq collects data from a varying mix of apps, the identities of which are commercially sensitive. Apps may be added to or deleted from the secure and summary data products over time. This, along with increasing national coverage and mobile phone uptake, results in general increases in apparent activity over the period covered by the data.

The dataset would benefit from comparison with population estimates (e.g. census data) to investigate coverage issues. 2016 data have the highest percentage of suppressed counts, and data suppression generally decreases over time, particularly in metropolitan (Met) areas. Data suppression levels in metropolitan areas generally fall below 50% by 2020.