Earlier Aarogya Setu got 2 stars for the policy which suggests that collected data is deleted after a period of time and that 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. All the COVIDD-19 contact tracing apps in the world were reviewed and scored based on how they work, and the government policies and processes that have been put in place around them.
The Aarogya Setu app rating has been downgraded to 1 out of 5 stars, with only ‘data destruction’ being the parameter that it has ticked, in a detailed report published by MIT Technology Review.
The revised rating comes after MIT researchers evaluated the app and found that it in the parameter of ‘data minimisation’.
Earlier Aarogya Setu got 2 stars for the policy which suggests that collected data is deleted after a period of time and that data collection is minimal.
However, even earlier, it didn’t perform well on the parameters of voluntary use, limitations on data usage, and transparency — ending up with two out of five points on the Covid-19 app tracker index.
There is a repeated push to get the citizens to download and install the Aarogya Setu app on their smartphones.
Also Read: “Aarogya Setu: The story of a failure” Hacker Describe The Privacy Issues
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 Israel’s HaMagen, Austria’s Stopp Corona app, Czech’s eRouska, Iceland’s Rakning C-19, Norway’s Smittestopp and Singapore’s Trace Together. Following these with four stars are Australia’s COVIDSafe, CovTracer from Cyprus, Italy’s Immuni and Poland’s ProteGO.
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