The country’s Ministry of the Interior requires all employees, public and private, to use the Aarogya Setu app starting May 4. According to officials, company leaders and officials are required to ensure the introduction of technology and will be punished in case of neglect.
The application has already been downloaded 80 million times, and its goal is to reach every smartphone user in the country (about 350 million). Owners of ordinary phones will be required to interact with the interactive voice system, reporting the necessary data.
The coronavirus epidemic has prompted governments to actively introduce methods of controlling human movement as a means of containing the spread of the new coronavirus. The technology is being offered as an alternative to broad quarantine measures. The natural desire of the state to provide broad control over citizens under normal conditions is limited by basic laws. And if in most countries people are offered a choice because of expressed fears of respecting civil rights regarding mass surveillance, then India does not seem to be concerned about public opinion.
Although the application relies on anonymous device identifiers and stores encrypted recordings of Bluetooth interactions with other devices, the Internet Freedom Foundation said that the application does not comply with data protection standards and does not provide sufficient transparency of the algorithms.
Mozilla warned that it was not completely clear how the data collected by Aarogya Setu would be used, and added that there were no necessary laws protecting the privacy of citizens.
