Aarogya Setu: India’s official coronavirus surveillance application released
The Government of India is officially releasing a coronavirus surveillance application – Aarogya Setu
Last week, we reported that India is building coronavirus surveillance based on the location of your cell phone. Now the government has officially released an app called Aarogya Setu (which translates from Sanskrit as “Bridge of Health”).
The core function of the application remains the same as the beta: using your phone’s location data and Bluetooth to determine if you were close to COVID-19 infected people, searching for a database of known cases.
The app determines that all your data is encrypted on your device. By looking at the code, it sends your information to the server in an anonymous form to check if you are close to an infected person. To do this, the app relies on Bluetooth to check if you were six meters away from the infection.
The app will share your information with the government if you have been diagnosed with a positive coronavirus or if you have been in close contact with a positive test person. The app’s Privacy Policy suggests that it’s worth not sharing your information with third parties.
Aarogya Setus also has great features like a chatbot to find out if you have coronavirus symptoms, updated updates from the Ministry of Health and a list of instruction numbers for each state in India.
For a few days, there have been a few data misrepresentations by state governments. Karnataka published the addresses of hundreds of people in quarantine in an effort to keep them away – a change that puts these people at risk of pollution and possibly worse in the hands of the feared public. In addition, the personal information of about 20 isolated people isolated in Telangana, a southern Hyderabad city, has been leaked from a government agency database.
With this application, the government intends to limit the spread of the community in the context of the ongoing 21-day closure.
The app is currently available for iOS and Android and supports 11 languages. The app may not appear in Play Store Search yet, but it will be listed shortly. Now see how the Indian government encourages people to use it.
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