Aarogya Setu only gets stars for the policy which suggests that collected data is deleted after a period of time and that the data collection is minimal.
New Delhi| Aarogya Setu, the app which is flagged for privacy issues, is a contact-tracing app developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
The app has nearly 100 million users at present, was reviewed as part of a larger study by a group of MIT researchers. A total of 25 contact-tracing apps from across the globe were reviewed and scored based on how they work, and the government policies and processes that have been put in place around them.
There is a repeated push to get the citizens to download and install the Aarogya Setu app on their smartphones.
Aarogya Setu only gets stars for the policy which suggests that collected data is deleted after a period of time and that the data collection is minimal.
Also Read: âAarogya Setu: The story of a failureâ Hacker Describe The Privacy Issues
However, it didnât perform well on the parameters of voluntary use, limitations on data usage, and transparency â ending up with two out of five points on the Covid19 app tracker index.
Even when the official policy suggests that downloading Aarogya Setu is voluntary, India is making its contact-tracing app indirectly mandatory for its citizens, the researchers noted.
The contact-tracing apps that get five stars are Austriaâs Stopp Corona app, Czechâs eRouska, Icelandâs Rakning C-19, Israelâs HaMagen, Singaporeâs Trace Together and Norwayâs Smittestopp. Following these with four stars are Australiaâs COVIDSafe, CovTracer from Cyprus, Italyâs Immuni and Polandâs ProteGO.
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