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Location-tracking companies were under fire from privacy advocates, but now officials are using them to monitor populations as the economy reopens

The Trump administration wants to use Americans’ smartphone location data to help track and combat the spread of coronavirus.

Last December, the New York Times shone a light on the pervasive and invasive nature of smartphone tracking in place today. “Every minute of every day,” the newspaper reported, “everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies—largely unregulated, little scrutinized—are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files.”

Heat maps that show cellphone location data in the U.S. paint a disturbing picture of the potential spread of coronavirus as the country grapples with lockdown meaures and tries to stem the virus’ tide.

Rachel Maddow reports on politicians of a certain stripe who seem to view meat plant workers as being different from “regular people,” and shares a data visualization that shows how coronavirus can spread from meat plants, well beyond the plant workers.

Despite advice from the U.S. government amid the COVID-19 pandemic, plenty of Americans are still traveling. To curb the spread of infection, citizens have been told to keep traveling to a minimum.

Over the past week, there has been an average of 100 new COVID-19 cases per day in South Dakota, a rate that has steadily risen since last month.

The data shows that the COVID-19 outbreaks currently threatening meat supply chains in the US could have impacts beyond plants’ local areas.

President Trump urged Americans on March 16 to avoid gatherings of 10 or more people in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

As countries around the world look for ways to track coronavirus infections using people’s personal smartphones, measures President Trump says the U.S. is also considering, privacy experts and technologists warn that the U.S. government faces an uphill battle to put such surveillance into practice.

Las Vegas casinos, open for months now, are a likely hotbed for the spread of COVID-19. For many reasons, contact tracing has proved next to impossible as tourists return to homes across the U.S.

In the earlier days of the coronavirus pandemic, an animated map from a company called Tectonix went viral. It showed spring breakers leaving a Florida beach to return to their homes across the US, as a series of tiny orange dots congregating on a beach in early March scattered across the country over the following two weeks.

Our interview with Josh Anton, CEO of X-Mode, takes up the state of location, what marketers need to look for in a data partner and, of course, privacy.

Our interview with Josh Anton, CEO of X-Mode, takes up the state of location, what marketers need to look for in a data partner and, of course, privacy.

The location data market has responded to many external pressures in recent years. Guided by new privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA as well as operating system updates by Apple and Android.

X-Mode is working with app developers and data buyers to offer the highest quality data that strives to meet all current regulatory standards including the GDPR and CCPA.

Location Data Startup Officially Launches, Grows Globally Through Million-Dollar Seed Round

X Mode Founder and CEO Josh Anton came up with the idea for the app “Drunk Mode” after getting drunk dialed during his junior year at the University of Virginia.

The location data industry is poised for vast changes over the next year and decade. Increasing privacy regulation and better understanding of data quality are indicative of the shift to come – one that’s eerily similar to what happened during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.