Aarogya Setu row: CIC pulls up Centre for 'no data on app creators'; app clarifies

In a controversial development, the Central Information Commission (CIC) on Tuesday issued show-cause notices to the CPIOs, Ministry of Electronics, National Informatics Centre, National E-Governance Division (NeGD) after it failed to inform who and how Aarogya Setu app was created. The CIC asked NIC to explain how it had no information about the creation of the App, inspite of being mentioned as the platform's designer, developer and host, as per reports. The app has issued a clarification regarding its creation, sharing the open-access source code of the app - which will give details regarding the app.

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What was the Aarogya Setu 'creators' issue?

The CIC issued show-cause notices after the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) had failed to furnish information about the process of creation of Aarogya Setu App to an RTI query. As per the ministry's RTI reply, NIC stated that it "does not hold the information" relating to the App's creation. After reading such a baffling reply, the petitioner had pointed out that this lapse could 'essentially lead to security compromise of millions of Indians' personal and user data'. The CIC then held that 'denial of information cannot be used by public authorities to push off the matter', asking how it is possible that the App was created by NIC, but has no clue about its origin.

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Aarogya Setu clarification

In response to CIC's summons, Aarogya Setu clarified that the app was developed in 21 days by NIC in collaboration with volunteers from industry and academia. The names of those associated with the development of the app and management of the app ecosystem at various stages were shared when the code was released in the public domain. The app has been developed by more than 16.23 crore users augmenting the efforts of front line health workers in the COVID-19 fight.

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What is the Aarogya Setu App?

The Centre's Aarogya Setu App is currently being used for contact-tracing amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The application uses  Bluetooth and GPS data of the user to collect surveillance for contact tracing in Containment Zones. Experts state that the app's usage of GPS-based location data is gaining more date than what is necessary. Moreover, experts state that the location data is not used by the app on an individual basis, but on an aggregated basis. After several data analysts questioned why the Centre has not made the source code of the app available for examination by the larger technology community, the Centre made the source code available on open source on 26 May 2020.