SafeGraph, a location and business intelligence firm is collaborating with several researchers, nonprofits, and public agencies to help address the COVID-19 pandemic. Safegraph obtains GPS data by regularly pinging 18 million smartphones with certain apps each day. It shares with its partners aggregated, anonymized data related to people's mobility patterns and foot traffic to buisnesses. Interested parties can request to join the consortium and access Safegraph data using an application form on its website. SafeGraph's data has also been used for data journalism. The Washington Post, for example, published a story on the amount of US residents staying at home based on an analysis of aggregated cell phone data. The analysis suggests that US residents spent about 90 percent of their time at home through April 2020.