The Weekend Leader - Digital watchdog raises privacy concerns over Aarogya Setu app

Digital watchdog raises privacy concerns over Aarogya Setu app

Chennai

23-April-2020

Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a digital liberties watchdog group, has described Aarogya Setu, the government of India’s contact-tracing app to combat the COVID-19 pandemic as “a privacy minefield.”

The IFF’s report observes that the app “does not adhere to principles of minimisation, strict purpose limitation, transparency and accountability” and “it is inconsistent with the right to privacy, is conceivably a risk toward a permanent system of mass surveillance, and suggests clear recommendations to arrest these risks.”

The following points have been culled out from a report published in their website:

To protect people’s right to privacy, countries (including Singapore) say that contact tracing will be used strictly for disease control and cannot be used to enforce lockdowns or quarantines. Aarogya Setu retains the flexibility to do just that, or to ensure comply legal orders and so on.

The app “is capable of wrongfully identifying people as COVID-19 positive as admitted in the app’s Terms of Service. We ask in our report the question in our paper, does this mean people can get diagnosed as being infected with coronavirus based on an application rather than an actual medical test? Similarly, does this mean that a false positive entails that I cannot use public transport and go to work or leave the city to visit friends? This evokes imagery of the Chinese model of surveillance during COVID-19 and we have highlighted these risks as well in the report.”

The “Government talks about certain obligations to delete certain personal data from its application after a 30 day time period. However, as expected this claim comes with enough exceptions which facilitate government discretion. This is compounded with the fact that both researchers and individual users cannot actually check if the Government has deleted people’s personal information and has no means of transparently auditing what the app is doing in the backend.”

Finally, the app runs very palpable risks of either expanding in scope or becoming a permanent surveillance architecture. People are describing the current times as 9/11 on steroids. And with 9/11 we saw the creation and proliferation of mass interception capabilities for some governments. The Government has failed to provide any defined period by when it intends to review, delete and ultimately destroy its systems and data which is collected under the Aarogya Setu project. – TWL Bureau



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