The cell phones of some spring breakers who flouted coronavirus warnings were tracked. This is how From CNN Business' Donie

The Trump administration wants to use Americans' smartphone location data to help track and combat the spread of coronavirus. Now, a pair of US data companies are making a public pitch to show just how that kind of technology might work.

X-Mode and Tectonix focused on a high-profile case: tracking location data from the phones of people who visited the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in March  among them spring breakers who made national news two weeks ago when they ignored warnings to practice social distancing despite the worsening coronavirus pandemic.

The results of tracking data, a map posted on Twitter, showed where people went after they visited the beach, spreading out all across the country to major cities including New York and Chicago, possibly bringing the coronavirus with them.

X-Mode says it provides location tracking services to app makers for the likes of weather and transit apps. The locations of spring breakers and others with those apps on their phones could have been tracked. X-Mode says the data it collects through apps and then provides to advertisers and other companies is anonymized, meaning it does not match individuals to the devices it tracks. The company did not provide the names of the apps their technology is embedded in.

"We wanted to showcase the impact of what happens when you don't exercise social distancing and essentially how small our community is," Josh Anton, X-Mode's CEO, told CNN Business on Tuesday. "Our community's very connected."