In mid-March, at least two government teams in different parts of the country started ideating on how they could use digital technology to fight the fast-spreading pandemic. They reviewed international examples. Consulted experts. Got collaborators.
One of those efforts morphed into the central government’s Aarogya Setu project. The other team’s idea turned into the Mahakavach app, which the Maharashtra government has started using to monitor home-quarantined individuals. While the slated objective of both these public health apps is to tackle covid-19, they arrived at radically different solutions, with different interpretations on privacy and consent. In the weeks ahead, those differences are going to increasingly matter.
Over the past three weeks, 11 of the 17 apps that Indian public authorities have launched to fight covid-19 have the same goal: quarantine tracking. Some governments are using traditional mass surveillance tools for the same goal. Delhi police, for instance, ordered quarantine monitoring using mobile phone tracking (which is often used in criminal investigations). Kerala and Pune have deployed drones. The list continues.
But none of these come close to the scale and ambition of the central government’s flagship app, Aarogya Setu. The app can alert users if they come in close contact with a covid-19 positive person, at least in theory.
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Everyone is hoping that technology will serve as a catalyst and help curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. But these efforts have already begun to raise complicated questions about civil liberties and individual privacy.
The scepticism stems from initial actions of public authorities. The Karnataka government initially published details of home-quarantined individuals along with their addresses in a mobile app. In Kerala’s Pathanamthitta district, a database of covid-19 patients and quarantined persons was breached. 11 of the 17 apps which Mint reviewed don’t even have a privacy policy. And there is an important reason why it should matter.
Privacy should never take a backseat, said Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at MIT Media Lab, who led the team that built Safe Paths, a privacy-preserving digital contact-tracing app. “It is not only an issue of an individual’s right. Any data breach can turn it into an issue of national security. If the details of the physical social graph of key individuals (say, nuclear scientists or air force pilots) gets leaked, it can be misused,” he explained.
Most of the tools have been rapidly developed in the last three weeks and their adoption will only grow as the virus spreads further. It is important to know what the apps can do, what they can’t, and where we are headed.
Source: livemint
