EXCLUSIVE | Govt Ignores Its Own Vital Safeguards on Aarogya Setu
The article was originally published in The Quint. Read here.
It is now official what privacy activists have long been worried about. Responses to RTI queries reveal that the Government of India has failed to implement measures to safeguard and secure data of millions of Indians collected by the controversial COVID-19 tracing app, Aarogya Setu.
Two days after the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) and National Informatics Centre (NIC) were pulled up by the Central Information Commission for evasive answers about the app’s creation, this author can now exclusively reveal that the government has failed to implement key provisions of the ‘Aarogya Setu Data Access and Knowledge Sharing Protocol 2020’.
These revelations, including a lack of audit mechanisms and any procedure for anonymisation of data, raise serious questions about the government’s attitude towards protection of the data and privacy of millions of Indians, and the trust that can be imposed in digital health initiatives like this.
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