Can location data from smartphones help slow the coronavirus? Facebook is giving academics a chance to try

It’s emerging as one of the more promising — and potentially controversial — ideas to slow the spread of the coronavirus: collecting smartphone data to track where people have gone and who they’ve crossed paths with.

The White House has discussed the notion, and several companies are reportedly in talks with the Trump administration to share aggregated user data. Researchers in the U.K. are working on one, and a team led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is , with an eye toward protecting user privacy. China and South Korea developed their own to try to clamp down on their own outbreaks, though their approaches likely wouldn’t be palatable in countries with greater expectations of privacy.