By Gabriela Mello

SAO PAULO, April 1 (Reuters) - Brazil's largest wireless carrier Telefonica Brasil SA will provide cellphone data to help authorities slow the spread of coronavirus in Sao Paulo state, the epicenter of the disease's outbreak in Latin America's largest country.

As part of the cooperation agreement announced on Wednesday, the company operating under the brand Vivo will provide the Sao Paulo government with data on people's movement and concentration of groups to check whether its quarantine rules are being followed, as well as anticipate potential contagion trends.

"We've been investing heavily in big data and artificial intelligence in the past five years and when the coronavirus pandemic started we built applications to help fighting it," Vivo's Chief Data Officer, Luiz Medici, told Reuters in a phone interview.

"We have plenty of antennas scattered across the region that allow us aggregate data on mobile lines without identifying our customers," he added, playing down concerns on privacy issues.

The initiative is similar to one rolled out earlier this month by telecom operators in Italy, Germany and Austria, which in turn followed more invasive tracking activities in countries like China, Taiwan and South Korea.

In 2019, Vivo had a mobile customer base of 74.6 million in Brazil, a market share of 32.9%, according to its latest earnings report.

"It's a statistically relevant base and updated in real-time," said Patricia Ellen, Sao Paulo state secretary of economic development, science and technology. She noted that the cooperation agreement was backed by state of emergency decrees issued by federal and state governments.

The tie-up with Vivo, she added, could last up to a year and is one of the projects supported by a crisis contingency task-force created by Sao Paulo state Governor Joao Dória.

"We're also talking to other carriers to develop other working fronts," Ellen said without elaborating.

Dória, who defends social isolation measures to contain the virus, has openly criticized President Jair Bolsonaro for his handling of the outbreak, which had killed 201 people out of 5,717 confirmed cases as of Tuesday, according to Brazil's Health Ministry.

About a week ago, Vivo rival TIM Participações SA struck a similar partnership with Rio de Janeiro's city hall to monitor people's movement throughout the city. (Reporting by Gabriela Mello; Editing by Christian Plumb and Tom Brown)

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