"The U.S. government has broad authority to request personal data in the case of a national emergency but does not have the legal authority, except in criminal investigations, to insist that companies turn it over, said Al Gidari, director of privacy at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.
With appropriate safeguards, Gidari said the potential use of location data to combat coronavirus is “a real opportunity to do something positive with the technology and still protect people’s privacy.”
Ryan Calo, an associate law professor at the University of Washington, said location-sharing partnerships between government and industry, like phone location data or GPS-sharing apps, could serve as critical tools for officials wanting to know, for instance, where crowds are violating social-distance rules or which hospitals are dangerously strained.
But other ideas now being pursued in the U.S., including consumer apps where people are mapped based on their self-submitted health status, threaten to promote a false sense of security that could leave more people at risk.
“The immediate and obvious trouble is where you purport to convert that information that’s crowdsourced, that’s imperfect, that can be gamed, into some kind of broader knowledge that people can deploy to avoid getting infected,” Calo said."