PRIVACY While the government is working their fingers to the bone in curbing the COVID-19 spread across the country, they’ve gone the extra mile to keep a stern eye on any more potential cases of the virus. The mobile app, Arogya Setu was PRIVACY launched on April 2nd with an aim to track down coronavirus cases on an individual level and help contain its outspread. Within a span of 13 days, it became one of the most downloaded apps with 50 million downloads nationwide.
The Arogya Setu app uses the mobile phone’s GPS and Bluetooth to help track and determine whether you’ve been near (within 6 feet distance) a COVID-19 infected person or not. With these near private demands, the app is raising major privacy concerns among masses as it doesn’t frankly comply with other such tracking apps. The app is silent on how or where the data is being handled, the level of encryption, and also about its privacy policy.
In addition to this, the secret source code of the app is raising inquisitiveness on the same as other nations like Singapore too had contact tracing apps but with open source codes. On being asked, the CEO of MyGovIndia, one of the app developing body, said that the data being fed will not be used for anything else but medical PRIVACY purposes, and also that no one’s personal data will be disclosed or shared and would be deleted after a fixed span of thirty days from their servers.
Privacy watchdog, Internet Freedom Foundation appealed Prime Minister Modi to refrain from mandating download of the app on every cell as it can have a damaging effect on privacy, autonomy, and dignity of workers. There’s news PRIVACY that the smartphones now manufactured PRIVACY, will have the app pre-installed.
The question being will our privacy be hindered with a mere contact tracing app, much awareness still needs to be brought about on the same among people.
