Google Maps releases ‘busyness’ feature to help you avoid busy areas

As the Omicron variant of COVID-19 spreads through the world, Google Maps has released a new feature to help users avoid busy areas. Google Maps will now show you when certain areas, like neighbourhoods, streets, or markets, are busier than usual. Users can use this information to avoid busy areas.

Google Maps busy areas

Google Maps combines live busyness trends from places in an area, like stores, restaurants, parks, cafes, and more to determine its overall busyness level. Through this data, Google knows how busy an area generally is. When the area is at its busiest, it’ll be highlighted as a ‘Busy Area’ on Google Maps.

Google says that to protect users’ privacy, their systems don’t calculate busyness information for residential places like a house or apartment.

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To determine popular times, wait times, and visit duration, Google uses aggregated and anonymized data from users who have opted in to Google Location History. Popular times, wait times, and visit duration are shown for the business if it gets enough visits from these users.

Google uses differential privacy which ensures that busyness data can’t be used to identify a single user. If there is not enough information to provide accurate trends, Google doesn’t show the busyness indicator at all.