NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India is aggressively pushing a state-backed contact tracing app to fight the spread of COVID-19, raising fears that the world’s second-most populous nation is on its way to Chinese-style methods of high tech social control.
FILE PHOTO: The Aarogya Setu app logo is seen on a mobile phone in this illustration picture taken May 3, 2020. Picture taken on May 3, 2020. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi/Illustration
The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has touted its app, Aarogya Setu, or “Health Bridge,” as a key tool in fighting the deadly coronavirus. With more than 70,000 people already infected, the number of cases in India is expected to exceed China, the origin of the outbreak, within a week.
Like many apps being rolled out around the world, Aarogya Setu uses Bluetooth signals on smartphones to record when people come in close contact with one another, so that contacts can be quickly alerted when a person tests positive for COVID-19.
But the Indian app also uses GPS location data to augment the information gathered via Bluetooth and build a centralized database of the spread of the infection—an approach avoided by most countries for privacy reasons.
And it mimics China’s health QR code system with a feature that rates a person’s likely health status with green, orange or red colours, signifying whether the individual is safe, at high risk or a carrier of the virus.
On top of that, the federal government earlier this month made use of the app mandatory for all public and private sector employees returning to work as the world’s biggest lockdown eases—drawing sharp criticism from digital rights’ advocates.
It made India the world’s only democratic country to make the use of a contact tracing app mandatory for its citizens, according to Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).
“The government is virtually forcing you and taking your data without consent,” said B.N. Srikrishna, a former Supreme Court judge, who led an effort to draft India’s first data-privacy law.
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