The U.S. government is in discussions with tech companies on how they could use geolocation data from users to combat the current COVID-19 global pandemic.

According to The Washington Post, the discussions include Facebook Inc., Google LLC and a wide array of tech companies and health experts on how they can use location data to fight the virus, including whether people are keeping a safe distance from other people. Under the guidelines issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the White House, Americans are being encouraged to avoid social gatherings in groups of more than 10 people and to practice so-called “social distancing.”

Public health experts are said to be interested in the possibility that private-sector companies could compile the data in an anonymous, aggregated form, which they could potentially use to map the spread of the infection.

Pointing out the Orwellian aspects of the plan, the Washington Post article noted that “it’s also an approach that could leave some Americans uncomfortable, depending on how it’s implemented, given the sensitivity when it comes to details of their daily whereabouts.”

That Big Brother now wants to track smartphone users, despite occasional protests about privacy, doesn’t come as a great surprise. Pre-global pandemic in November, users of Fitbit Inc. devices were said to be ditching their products because of tracking concerns after the company was acquired by Google LLC. The State of California was reported Nov. 6 to be investigating Facebook’s privacy practices and questions were asked in July as to whether the data breach of Capital One Financial Corp. had major privacy issues.

All it took for companies tracking their users’ every move to go from “1984” to a positive was a global pandemic, arguably the worst since the Spanish Flu in 1918-1919.

“We’re exploring ways that aggregated anonymized location information could help in the fight against COVID-19,” a Google spokesperson said. “One example could be helping health authorities determine the impact of social distancing, similar to the way we show popular restaurant times and traffic patterns in Google Maps.”

The U.S. government is also enthused. The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy said that “we’re encouraged by American technology companies looking to leverage aggregated, anonymized data to glean key insights for COVID-19 modeling efforts.”

“Anonymized” data will be the key here and once the pandemic ends, history will judge whether what the tech companies did was proper. Although in theory anonymized data is possible, time and time again it has been found that it isn’t that hard to match that data to actual users.

Image: geralt/Pixabay