THE ‘LONG ARM' OF AN APP

In his April 14 address that announced the extension of the coronavirus lockdown till May 3, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed to Indians to follow a seven-pronged strategy to combat the pandemic.

- Kaushik Deka

One of the measures was to download the Aarogya Setu contact-tracing app. The app, conceived by NITI Aayog, has been developed in two weeks by the National Informatics Centre in collaboration with the developers of makemytrip.com and 1mg.com.

Aarogya Setu is designed on the premise that if two mobile phones are within Bluetooth range of each other, their users are potentially close enough to transmit the novel coronavirus to one another. Since its launch on April 2, the app, which is available in 11 Indian languages, has registered nearly 50 million downloads. A World Bank report released on April 12 says innovative solutions like the Aarogya Setu could greatly help track contagious diseases while a University of Oxford study considers digital contact-tracing as effective, provided there is widespread adoption.

Despite such praise, Aarogya Setu has attracted criticism over privacy issues as it seeks users’ personal information, such as name, age, sex, profession and countries visited in the past 30 days. Every 15 minutes, it collects data about the user’s location and the places the user visits. According to the app’s terms of service, personal information and location data are securely stored on the mobile device. The information is uploaded to a central server only when a user tests positive for COVID-19 or a self-assessment of symptoms indicates the possibility of infection.