The anonymised data, collected from June 11 to July 23 - lockdown 5.0 began at 11.59pm on July 15.

The data, broken down by region, was gathered from people who had Google location settings on their phones turned on, and is compared to a baseline recorded between January 3 and February 6 this year - it shows some dramatic changes in the Ballarat local government area.

While attendance at businesses fell 18 per cent compared to the baseline, attendance at residence rose a corresponding 17 per cent.

Attendance at "retail or recreation" fell 38 per cent, and attendance at parks fell 30 per cent.

Supermarket and pharmacy attendance rose 8 per cent.

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The data also notes public transport usage fell 65 per cent, however most of the subject period was during the school holidays - school bus usage counts as public transport, though previous lockdowns have also shown a severe drop in public transport usage in Ballarat.

Across Victoria, park attendance fell 47 per cent, and workplaces fell 37 per cent.

"These reports show how visits and length of stay at different places change compared to a baseline," the Google document states.

"We calculate these insights based on data from users who have opted in to Location History for their Google Account, so that the data represents a sample of our users. As with all samples, this may or may not represent the exact behaviour of a wider population.

"No personally identifiable information, like an individual's location, contacts or movement, is made available at any point.

"People who have Location History turned on can choose to turn it off at any time from their Google Account and can always delete Location History data directly from their Timeline."

Ballarat tech expert and online privacy advocate George Fong said the data could be a positive and a negative, particularly as governments begin using different types of data more frequently.

"There are datasets that are being constantly collected from just about everything, from sewerage and temperatures, to where businesses are located," he said.

"Sometimes the datasets themselves aren't that useful, but put one on top of another, and if you get a storyteller that looks at and interprets the data for trends - that's highly useful stuff."

This particular set of data could be useful for contact tracers, for example, because it shows how people are changing their behaviour.

"The downside is all of that data, we're trusting a private corporation to treat that data anonymously," Mr Fong said.

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"There have been reported breaches of those rules by the authorities, where they've stepped well beyond the mandate for what they could use the data for - for every good thing we discover, there's always someone across the fence asking what we can use it for in terms of surveillance.

"With Google, or Facebook, you are the product, if you want to use it you trade off some of your rights in terms of that data."

The full datasets, from across the world, are available online.

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