India’s Covid-19 App Is a Privacy Nightmare
Is Aarogya Setu a sophisticated surveillance system under the guise of contact tracing?
To contain the spread of Covid-19, the Indian government imposed a strict nationwide lockdown on March 25 that affects the 1.3 billion people currently living in India. While the lockdown was set to end on April 14, this date has now been pushed twice.
Throughout this period, the government has enacted various measures to curb the spread of the virus, but there’s one in particular that stands out: the government’s repeated insistence for people to download the Aarogya Setu app.
Aarogya Setu — meaning “health bridge” — is an iOS and Android app developed under the guidance of India’s National Informatics Centre through a public-private partnership model. The app aims to help curb the spread of coronavirus with the help of tech-aided contact tracing.
While countries across the world are developing contact-tracing apps of their own and a rare Apple-Google partnership has emerged to help speed up the process, India’s efforts to get an app on people’s phones seem to go further than most.
