Facebook and Google in discussion with US White House over data location sharing in the context of coronavirus pandemic

According to Wired, Google and Facebook are ‘discussing plans with the White House to share collective data on people’s movements during the coronavirus pandemic’. In order to evaluate the spread of the virus as well as to assess the effectiveness of measures of social distancing across the USA, the two firms are looking at how to share aggregated data related to human behavior in the context of this pandemic crisis. It appears that the idea for Facebook and Google to analyze users’ movements came up during ‘brainstorming sessions between the White House and representatives of big tech companies on Sunday’. However, Google has stated it would not share any “aggregate anonymized location data for this purpose as we are still assessing the best way to help.”