In today’s letter: The return of Christopher Mims (he was on book leave); panic-shopping advice from our new personal tech columnist, Nicole Nguyen; Family & Tech columnist Julie Jargon on how home-school mandates can amplify the digital divide; and more. But first ...

We have a lot of personal responsibility in the age of the coronavirus: Wash our hands; maintain six feet of distance with others; ration our toilet-paper squares. And now to the list I add: Don’t share your phone with others.

Knowing that phones can carry more germs than a toilet bowl, I became oddly obsessed with cleaning my iPhone over the last few weeks. Yet, as many infectious disease experts told me for my column, sanitizing our phones is really only necessary if you’ve allowed others to touch it.

Still, I didn’t allow the opportunity to become the world’s top phone-cleaning journalist escape me: I scrubbed an iPhone 8 for hours to see if disinfecting wipes or wipes with at least 55% isopropyl alcohol (required to kill the virus) would damage the device. (Spoiler: It won’t. Even Apple changed its policy to allow these wipes this week.)

Was smartphone cleaning really the biggest tech news of this week? Nope. But maybe, just maybe, I subconsciously decided to tackle it because it feels like the one piece of the tech puzzle I currently have some control over.

Across the internet, I couldn’t find the essentials I wanted to buy. Though, thankfully, some of the tips from my new colleague Nicole Nguyen helped. Working from home is uncharted territory—and is even impacting productivity of the world’s smartest tech minds. I can’t even go to the Apple Store if my keyboard breaks again. And social distancing is going to make us all confront a new type of loneliness. 

So, yes, maybe I’ll scrub my phone multiple times a day—even if I don’t need to.

As you settle into this new normal, please let me know your biggest technology questions and concerns. Email me at joanna.stern@wsj.com.   

—Joanna is the senior personal technology columnist, ordinarily based in our New York office but currently working from home.

Cleaning your phone can be a solid coronavirus-prevention practice but how much is too much? What products are OK to use? Joanna got answers by scrubbing a brand new iPhone 8 with everything from disinfecting wipes to acidic toilet-bowl cleaner.

The newest member of the WSJ Tech team, personal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen, wrote her first piece this week. It’s a guide to shopping during a pandemic panic, with useful tips to find elusive items and avoid being gouged. She’ll soon be writing every week. You can reach her at nicole.nguyen@wsj.com and @nicnguyen on Twitter.

Wheeling and Dealing: SoftBank said it would buy back up to 7% of its own shares, following plunging stock prices and a pressure campaign from one of the world’s most aggressive activist investors, Elliott Management. Separately, Twitter reached a truce with the hedge fund that will add new directors to the social-media company’s board but leave CEO Jack Dorsey in place.

Charged Talks: Kenneth Chenault will be leaving Facebook’s board following disagreements with Mark Zuckerberg over the company’s governance and political policies, according to people familiar with the matter. The former AmEx boss is the fourth independent director to leave the board in the last year. 

Change of Plans: Airbnb’s bookings are tanking in major cities world-wide amid the coronavirus pandemic, new data show, compounding the pain for the home-sharing giant as it mulls listing in a turbulent market. 

No Crystal Ball: The spreading coronavirus is shaping up to deliver mixed fortunes for tech companies. Slack Technologies said the fallout from the pandemic has spurred interest in its workplace-collaboration software, while infrastructure-software and chip-making giant Broadcom withdrew its annual revenue guidance, saying sales were too difficult to predict.

Healthy Conversations: Researchers working with Twitter say efforts have stalled to make conversations on the platform less toxic, and some worry that the company's commitment last week to boost growth could further complicate those attempts.

All of us sense that the internet is no cure for loneliness, and research supports our intuition. People who spend more time online are less happy, and some studies suggest this is more than mere correlation. Loneliness, in turn, is an actual hazard to our health, more dangerous than obesity and nearly as lethal as smoking, writes Christopher.

• Google Tracked His Bike Past a Burglarized Home—and Made Him a Suspect (NBC News)

• TikTok Is Winning Young African Stars from YouTube and Instagram (Quartz)

• The Traffic Merchant: He Built an Empire on Dubious Online Traffic (BuzzFeed)

• Pancakes, Euphoria, and a Robot Parade: Inside MIT's Grueling Puzzle Competition (Popular Mechanics)

WSJ’s Serena Ng writes a first-person account of how she and her family have dealt with daily life in the weeks after government-mandated school closures and working from home, as authorities attempted to stop the spread of coronavirus in Hong Kong.

Software developers sent home by Apple CEO Tim Cook have complained of slow download speeds and mounting confusion over still-evolving new internal rules about what work they are allowed to perform.

Meanwhile, over at Google’s empty offices, employees say there’s an eerie feeling, akin to visiting the site of a robbery. The snack bars, bereft of candy and almond milk, are bare. Even some dry-erase boards have been wiped clean, a nod to the possibility that the offices could be abandoned for a while.

Silicon Valley’s tech giants are a week ahead of the rest of the country in conducting a nearly million-person, real-time experiment into whether it is possible to operate a fully remote workforce in the age of the coronavirus, report Tripp Mickle and Rob Copeland. 

Now that everybody’s suddenly living in Hangout hell, we felt it might be useful to share three very basic tips for better videochats.

• Make sure there’s a light source on your face. Generally sitting with a window behind you is a bad idea, but you can make it work (as you can see above) if you have enough light shining in front of you.

• Frame your head and shoulders in the shot. Too much empty space above your head will make you look small, and that might matter in negotiations or interviews. Also, it’s best to be level with the camera and to lift your head up—nobody wants a double chin.

• Look at the CAMERA, not the screen. If you’re talking, it can be disconcerting if your gaze isn’t straight on.

If I’d been going for bonus points, I’d probably also have shaved my face and not worn a 10-year-old T-shirt I bought at a Walmart in Hawaii, but who’s counting? If you have any tips of your own, please tell us… or at least Joanna, who cares about this deeply. Her email address, once again, is joanna.stern@wsj.com. —Wilson Rothman

Note: Questions are edited for clarity and length.

As more schools close in response to the sweeping health crisis, this unprecedented remote-learning situation is expected to expose the tech gap between affluent and lower-income families and districts, as well as between urban and suburban districts and rural ones where high-speed internet doesn’t always exist. And even when everything works, there is always a question of how focused kids can be without the structure of a classroom, writes Julie.

In these trying times, we’re sharing the space typically reserved for evidence of our coming dystopian future with some images of hope, too. Like this one, depicting an “intelligent disinfection robot” that apparently uses UV light and disinfectant sprays to fight off disease in a hospital in Jiangsu, China. We can think of a lot of people who would love one of these in their house right about now.

We want to know what you think! Reply to this email and share your feedback.

Brought to you by personal tech editor Wilson Rothman and tech news editor Bowdeya Tweh. You can email them at wilson.rothman@wsj.com and bowdeya.tweh@wsj.com or find them on Twitter: @wjrothman and @bowknowsbiz.