US Govt Tracking Location Data of Citizens to Tackle COVID-19: Report

The Federal and State governments in the U.s. are reportedly tracking location data of millions of cellphone users in the country to better sympathise the movements of people during the coronavirus pandemic. Co-ordinate to officials, the tracking will help them better empathise how the actions of citizens are affecting the spread of the disease, only privacy advocates are ringing the warning bells about what this might mean for the constitutional rights of American citizens.

The report, which comes from The Wall Street Journal, claims that the GPS information is already helping the federal and local governments analyze the presence and motion of people in some of the major COVID-19 hotspots in the country. The ultimate aim, according to sources quoted by the publication, is to create an online portal for federal, state and local officials, containing geo-location data of people in 500 cities across the US to aid plan the epidemic response.

According to the report, the data is anonymized and is "stripped of identifying information like the name of a phone'south owner", but it's not immediately articulate if whatever other information is existence collected past the government. Some privacy advocates are also raising questions about whether regime agencies are using the pandemic every bit an excuse to comport mass surveillance on its citizens.

Either way, the officials spoken to by WSJ claim that the geo-location data shows "which retail establishments, parks and other public spaces are however drawing crowds that could risk accelerating the transmission of the virus". It is also said to be helping them decide how much people are complying with quarantine orders, thereby enabling them to better design their response to the pandemic.