Associate professor of cyber security at Monash University Carstern Rudolph said while it was impossible to know the intention behind every single trip, with enough detailed data it could be worked out in many situations. For example, if crowds of people were travelling to Marvel Stadium on a Friday night, it's a pretty good bet they're going to the footy. And if someone was travelling somewhere before 9am and returning after 5pm each day, they were probably going to work. Other uses for the data under consideration were how it could measure delays on our roads and public transport network, examine cycling and pedestrian routes, and look at how people accessed train stations. The Request for Information form stated there was no guarantee a tender process would go ahead. Responses to the request closed on Friday, with next steps to be determined in August. Professor Rudolph said there were two ways the government would most likely access our mobile phone location data.

It could buy the data from a commercial vendor who has already collected it, for example through other apps that users have enabled location tracking. Or it could work with telecommunications networks, who roughly know the locations of our phones via their connections with cell towers. This only gives an approximation of the phone's location, he said, but could become more accurate if Australia gets 5G. What is being proposed is nothing new, with our location data already available to and used by many companies, Professor Rudolph noted. "The planned use is definitely one of the more sensible and beneficial ones - at least compared to targeted advertising, price discrimination, or other uses." But Tim Warner, the chair of the Privacy Committee at Liberty Victoria, said the government needed to clarify exactly why it needed so much data.

"Our principle concern is it seems to be gathering an enormous amount of data which is very intrusive for reasons which haven't been clearly explained." The state government said in a statement no data it sourced would contain features that could identify individuals, adding, "The data collected helps us plan our road, train, tram and bus networks and make sure you can still get where you’re going when the network is disrupted." However, Mr Warner said this was not good enough. "They're proposing to take your information from your phone company and Google and any third parties they can talk to, and say 'individual A did this' and then strip away who individual A is," he said.