COVID-19 Aarogya Setu App That PM Wants Citizens To Download May Become Must: Sources

Aarogya Setu, the contact-tracing App the government has been pushing in its fight against coronavirus, may be made mandatory for all citizens amid a debate over privacy and surveillance. In discussions to scale up its campaign for more users, the government is debating whether it can make the App a must.

Sources say the government is internally weighing options like making the mass detail gathering application mandatory for people to use government services or for flights and metros.

No decision has been taken yet.

Aarogya Setu, or "health bridge" in Sanskrit, evaluates the chances of the user contracting the COVID-19 infection based on location, medical and travel history. It uses Bluetooth and location services to trace a user's contacts. Singapore uses a similar contract tracing App, but it uses Bluetooth only.

So far, the government has been pushing users to download the App voluntarily to protect themselves from coronavirus. Recently, government employees were ordered to download the App and check their health status before coming to work.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also urged citizens to download the App in his speeches.

In a recent paper, the Internet Freedom Foundation suggested that the App is "inconsistent with the right to privacy and is conceivably a risk toward a permanent system of mass surveillance".

The government is planning a campaign to address the concerns over privacy of the user, who has to log in details like foreign travel and health history while downloading the App and give access to the phone's bluetooth and GPS tracking. Recently, the government updated the privacy policy of Aarogya Setu to make it more citizen-friendly.

Sources say the government intends to communicate to people that the tracking data that will be downloaded by the App will "self-destruct".

According to industry estimates, India has over 50 crore smartphone users, a figure that is projected to rise to 80 crore by 2022.

The government has already achieved its goal of five crore downloads of Aarogya Setu.

It is believed that the government now wants to work towards an ambitious target of close to 25 to 30 crore downloads of the App.

India has more than 35,000 coronavirus cases, including 1,147 deaths.