India's number of cases is expected to exceed China's within a week. FMTNews TracingApp
NEW DELHI: India is aggressively pushing a state-backed contact tracing app to fight the spread of Covid-19, raising fears that the world’s second-most populous nation is on its way to Chinese-style methods of high tech social control.
But the Indian app also uses GPS location data to augment the information gathered via Bluetooth and build a centralised database of the spread of the infection — an approach avoided by most countries for privacy reasons. “The government is virtually forcing you and taking your data without consent,” said BN Srikrishna, a former Supreme Court judge, who led an unsuccessful effort to draft India’s first data-privacy law.
A paramilitary force guarding India’s airports and the metro train stations in capital New Delhi has proposed a similar plan for all passengers. “This demonstrates the incentives for why the government of India has taken a centralised approach,” the IFF said. “It is less about taking the least intrusive measure towards responding to the public health crisis, but more towards maximising the utility of data.”
An official at the government think-tank, NIT Aayog, said last month that the app was a “temporary solution to a temporary problem”, adding that the country may have stumbled across “the initial building block for a India health stack”.Critics say the government’s approach to the app is reminiscent of the Modi administration’s effort to make Aadhar, a biometric ID system, mandatory for everything from opening a new bank account to getting a mobile phone connection.
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