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Future of Privacy

U.S. seeks smartphone data to fight coronavirus

Moving the Market: The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and prevention are asking Facebook, Google and other tech giants to give them greater access to Americans' smartphone location data in order to help them combat the spread of coronavirus, sources from the tech firms who are familiar with the effort tell me.

• Federal health officials say they could use anonymous, aggregated user data collected by the tech firms to map the spread of the disease — a practice known as "syndromic surveillance" — and prevent further infections. They could also use the data to see whether people were practicing "social distancing."

• The officials have held at least two calls in recent days with representatives from the big tech companies, the sources said. Those officials are "very serious" about making this happen, a source at one of the tech companies said.

• Similar and more aggressive surveillance practices have already been put to use in China, South Korea and Israel, which has set off alarm bells among privacy advocates who fear what the government may do with users' data.

The big picture: The federal effort, first reported by The Washington Post, will force the tech giants to weigh their commitments to user privacy against their desire to help combat a disease that has cost thousands of human lives and upended the global economy.

• Some sources stressed that the data would be anonymized and that the government would not have access to specific individuals' locations. Moreover, they noted that users would be required to opt-in to the effort.

• Facebook, which already provides health researchers and NGOs in some countries with anonymized data to help disease-prevention efforts, said a similar effort to could be used "to understand and help combat the spread of the virus."

• But other sources warned that providing the government with greater access to anonymized location data now could lead to the erosion of individual privacy down the line, especially if the government starts to ask for non-anonymized data.

On the call: Representatives from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco, as well as White House and federal health officials, among others.

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Fighting the Virus

Mark Zuckerberg gives cash

Big in the Bay: Mark Zuckerberg has informed Facebook's 45,000 employees that they will all receive their six-month bonuses and an additional $1,000 to help them during the coronavirus outbreak, Facebook sources tell me.

• Sheryl Sandberg also announced that Facebook would be investing $100 million to help small businesses in over 30 countries that have been affected by the coronavirus.

The big picture: Facebook's efforts to alleviate the damage done by coronavirus are among the most aggressive of any major American business to date. It's a rare success story for a company that has been through the ringer of public opinion in recent years.

• Bonus: Zuckerberg is also personally investing in coronavirus research through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, while Sandberg has led more than $7 million in fundraising for Bay Area food banks.

🌁 What's Next 🌁

Eric Schmidt's philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures is holding a call with VCs today to discuss how they can use their resources to combat the coronavirus, CNBC's Brian Schwartz reports.

• "The call will also include representatives of Google, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Sergey Brin Family Foundation, the Bridgespan Group... and many others."

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U.S.-China Watch

Xi Jinping expels U.S. media

Big in Beijing: China has announced that it will expel American journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, an attack on press freedom that will increase tensions between China and the United States.

• The big picture: "Throwing out the big papers is one notch below closing down an embassy,” Orville Schell, a longtime American writer on China, tells the NYT. “It’s a devastatingly dangerous spiral."

The backstory: President Trump announced in February that five state-run Chinese news outlets would be more closely regulated amid concerns about their role in spreading propaganda.

• The next day, China said it would expel three Wall Street Journal reporters after the paper ran an opinion piece on coronavirus that referred to China as "the real sick man of Asia."

• Trump then announced that he would limit to 100 the number of Chinese citizens who could work in the U.S. for the five state-run news outlets.

What's next: NYT executive editor Dean Baquet, WSJ editor-in-chief Matt Murray and WaPo executive editor Marty Baron all condemned China’s decision and called for both the governments to resolve the dispute.

Market Links

• Lachlan Murdoch buys Tubi streaming service (WSJ)

• Meg Whitman says coronavirus will hurt Quibi (Information)

• Kyle Malady reports a 75% uptick in video game use (THR)

• Andrew Montalenti sees a boost for news sites (Recode)

• Audrey Gelman gets the Amanda Hess treatment (NYT)

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Zoom Zoom

Eric Yuan seizes his moment

Right on time: Eric Yuan's videoconferencing app Zoom has become "a cultural phenomenon" as the coronavirus outbreak forces people to stay home and spend more time interacting online, NYT's Taylor Lorenz, Erin Griffith and Mike Isaac report.

• The Zoom app is now "the top free download in Apple’s App Store," and while the stock market is crashing, "Zoom shares have soared this year, valuing the company at $29 billion."

The big picture: "The coronavirus crisis is showing us how to live online," NYT's Kevin Roose writes. "If there is a silver lining in this crisis, it may be that the virus is forcing us to use the internet as it was always meant to be used."

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Hail Mary

The NFL gives ESPN a lifeline

Talk of TV Land: Roger Goodell’s decision not to cancel the 2020 NFL Draft or the start of free agency is providing a temporary lifeline for sports media companies like ESPN that have suffered severe ratings drops as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.

• “The NFL really did everyone a favor,” ESPN executive Chris LaPlaca tells the Market, and the network has said it will “aggressively cover NFL news” to fill the programming void.

The big picture: The relief is temporary. Live sports, which brings in billions of dollars in ad revenue, is the last real asset of linear TV. The league suspensions brought on by the coronavirus outbreak thus pose an existential threat to the business model.

• ESPN's primetime ratings on Monday were down to just 381,000, per SBJ's John Ourand, an abysmally low number that equated to less than a tenth of the total audience watching Fox News.

What's next: In another blow to sports media, one of the biggest stories in the NFL — Tom Brady’s future with the New England Patriots — has now officially been resolved. ESPN reports he is expected to sign with The Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Correction: A headline in yesterday's newsletter stated that the NFL had cancelled its Draft. As the item below the headline made clear, the NFL only cancelled its live draft events, not the draft itself.

🏕 What's next: Rip Van Winkling. Read NYT's Charlie Warzel on the river rafters who went off the grid for 25 days and returned to a global pandemic.

See you tomorrow.