Coronavirus-tracking smartphone apps raise concerns about privacy

Your location data is already likely being used that way by mobile operators to feed traffic information to map apps

In Europe, officials, doctors and engineers are looking at how smartphones could be enlisted in the war against the spread of the new coronavirus.

One obvious attraction for health officials is the possibility of using smartphones to find out with whom someone diagnosed with Covid-19 has been in contact. But can this be done without intrusive surveillance and access to our devices that store a wealth of private information?

Firms can "anonymise" location data received from your smartphone by stripping out personal identifiers. It can then be presented in an "aggregate" form where individual and identifiable data points are not