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After an address from the prime minister, the Aarogya Setu app became the fastest downloaded app on record. Many believe it could have sinister implications. Photograph: Prabhat Kumar Verma/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock
After an address from the prime minister, the Aarogya Setu app became the fastest downloaded app on record. Many believe it could have sinister implications. Photograph: Prabhat Kumar Verma/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

India's Covid-19 app fuels worries over authoritarianism and surveillance

This article is more than 3 years old

State-built Aarogya Setu has had record downloads but critics warn of civil liberties implications

Narendra Modi’s request was simple: to help combat the spread of coronavirus, people should download an Indian government-built smartphone app that helps identify their risk of catching and spreading the virus.

“As more and more people use it, its effectiveness will increase,” the prime minister said in a televised address last month.

Within hours, the Aarogya Setu app became the fastest downloaded app on record, with 83 million users and counting.

India was not the first country to deploy technology for coronavirus contact tracing – China, the US, Singapore, Hong Kong and multiple European countries have developed apps. But in a country with no meaningful anti-surveillance, privacy or data protection laws (the 1885 Telegraph Act is still in use) and a nationalist government with unprecedented snooping powers, many fear it has sinister implications.

“The coronavirus is a gift to authoritarian states including India,” said the Indian author Arundhati Roy. “Pre-corona, if we were sleepwalking into the surveillance state, now we are panic-running into a super-surveillance state.”

Arundhati Roy: ‘We are panic-running into a super-surveillance state.’ Photograph: Samir Jana/Hindustan Times/Rex/Shutterstock

Since coronavirus took hold in early March, it has been met with mounting authoritarian measures by Modi’s government. Journalists critical of the government have been hit with police charges while students who held anti-government protests last year are suddenly being rounded up under draconian terrorism laws. Meanwhile, with the entire country placed under a strict lockdown, the normal mechanisms of justice, accountability and democracy have been heavily eroded, with gatherings – and therefore protests – banned and the courts all but suspended, ensuring lawyers have been unable to file bail applications.

Throughout April, Delhi police rounded up and detained student activists who helped organise massive protests against a citizenship law last year. Several of the female activists, one of whom is pregnant, have been accused of a “conspiracy” to instigate deadly religious riots in Delhi in February, and were arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), which is normally used in the context of terrorism. It means they can be held for six months with no charges and no bail.

Authoritarian measures have also been increasing in the volatile region of Kashmir. In a single week, the police used the same terrorism law to arrest a number of journalists in cases collectively described by the Editors Guild of India as a “gross misuse of power”.

“The excuse of the pandemic has meant the threshold for justifying arrests under terrorism laws, such as UAPA, has dropped further,” said Karuna Nundy, a supreme court lawyer. “But it has also become almost impossible to get a court hearing to determine whether an action is illegal or unconstitutional. So access to justice is now extremely limited.”

The app has fuelled concern that the pandemic is being used as a pretext to erode privacy and freedom of speech in the name of “winning the war” against coronavirus. “In this context, the justification for restrictions on civil liberties is a lot more palatable to the public and it is less closely scrutinised,” said Sidharth Deb, counsel at the Internet Freedom Foundation, who wrote a paper on the app.

Privacy violations and unprecedented surveillance have already been rife at the state level, from the personal details of everyone on quarantine lists in the state of Karnataka being published in the public domain to police tracking people in quarantine through GPS, drones and even geotagged selfies.

The app presents similar issues, but on a scale that could affect hundreds of millions of people. All data used to calculate risk of infection, from age and address to travel history and – through the use of GPS and bluetooth – people that users have come into close contact with over the past 14 days, is sent to an external server under the control of the federal government. According to the terms of use, users are not allowed to give their phones to others.

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The use of both Bluetooth and GPS makes the app far more invasive than its counterpart in Singapore. And when it comes to transparency around how the data will be handled and used, the Indian government has been far more opaque. Unlike in most other countries, there is no transparency on the limitations on the lifespan of database and no binding policy that it will not be repurposed after the pandemic. The app is equally vague about which government departments will have access to the Aarogya Setu database.

Abhishek Singh, the chief executive of MyGovIndia, which developed Aarogya Setu, said the app had been built “with privacy as the core principle”, with location data kept anonymised, all data of non-risk users deleted after 45 days, and high-risk users after 60 days.

“The government of India will use information only for administering necessary medical interventions,” he told the Guardian. “Data is not going to be used for any other purpose. No third party has access to data.”

But Deb said the app “presents a sweep of privacy related risks. This has the potential to be a permanent tool of surveillance and on top of it all, we don’t have legislation or a law or even an oversight mechanism to hold the government accountable and preserve our right to privacy.”

Some see it as evidence of India looking to China’s playbook, where technology was heavily deployed to monitor citizens under the guise of contact tracing. Indeed, downloading it could soon be the only way for people in India to freely leave the house, giving the government an unprecedented watch over its citizens. As of Friday, Aarogya Setu has been mandatory for all public, private and military employees. It will come pre-installed on all smartphones and may be used by the Delhi Metro to screen people who wish to use the service once lockdown is lifted.

Narendra Modi addresses the nation. Photograph: Biswarup Ganguly/Pacific Press/Rex/Shutterstock

Just as surveillance has become more heavy-handed during the pandemic, so too have attacks on the media. After the government imposed a nationwide lockdown on 24 March with just four hours notice, prompting negative media coverage, the supreme court issued a ruling that the media only publish the “official version” of events as put out in government bulletins.

Then, on 1 April, the police filed a report against Siddharth Varadarajan, the editor of independent news outlet the Wire, for an article detailing allegations that the chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh had violated physical distancing rules at a religious gathering. The charges against Varadarajan include the transmission of obscene material.

Varadarajan said it was “undoubtedly” part of an anti-democratic shift. “All the authoritarian impulses evident before are more pronounced today – intolerance of the media and free speech, tolerance of hate speech and religious polarisation, secrecy, lack of transparency and lack of communication,” he said.

Varadarajan’s case is not an isolated one. Last week the Chhattisgarh police issued a notice against the local journalist Neeraj Shivhare for his story on a female labourer starving during the lockdown, accusing him of the “punishable offence” of making “readers afraid and scared and tarnishing the image of the administration” during an epidemic.

“The courts are not functioning as they should, so the police also know it is harder for journalists to get relief from this kind of harassment,” said Varadarajan. “And of course their hope is that the media sitting on the fence will look at our situation and say: ‘Why take the risk of annoying the government?’”

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