European governments evaluate using smartphone location data to pinpoint COVID-19 carriers

MILAN, Italy -- European governments are evaluating invasive human-tracking tools to pinpoint carriers of the new coronavirus and determine who they might be infecting.

That worries privacy advocates, who fear such ubiquitous surveillance could be abused.

The use of digital tools to enforce strict social controls was pioneered by several of the Asian governments most successful at containing the pandemic locally.

Israel, too, has just begun tracking the movements of virus carriers going back two weeks, using historical data to identify with whom they intersected.

There is no indication yet that U.S. officials plan such an app.