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. But the following week photos showed thousands of people crowding Florida beaches at the peak of spring-break season.
Newly published phone location data shows that those gatherings could have an effect far beyond Florida.
Data aggregated by location data firm X-Mode Social shows 5,000 devices gathered at one Fort Lauderdale beach in mid-March. In the week that follows, those devices fan out and travel across much of the Eastern US, possibly reflecting spring breakers traveling home after vacation.
In a video published on Twitter, data-visualization group Tectonix GEO mapped the movement of phones across the country.
—Tectonix GEO (@TectonixGEO) March 25, 2020
Location data companies like X-Mode Social are able to track the precise location of smartphones across the globe using software built into apps that people download. The practice has raised the ire of privacy advocates, but location data firms and their partners insist that people's movements are anonymized and not directly tied to their identities.
"We take every effort to ensure privacy in the data we use," Tectonix GEO tweeted in response to one person's privacy concerns. "All device data is anonymized and we only work with partners who share our commitment to privacy and security above all."
An X-Mode Social spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider that the company complies with digital privacy laws including the recently-enacted CCPA, and that its data "is aggregated at the observation level and is not associated to a device identifier or physical person." That data doesn't include personal information like names, birth dates, gender, or contact information, the spokesperson said.
Footage of spring breakers partying in Florida despite social-distancing guidelines was shared widely earlier this month.
"If I get corona, I get corona," one 22-year-old said in a TV interview while partying on the beach (he later apologized).
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis initially refused to close beaches, but Florida state parks finally closed all beaches on Monday.
The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has surged past 2,400 in Florida and 85,000 people nationwide.
