How Aarogya Setu handles your Location Data: MyGov CEO

How Aarogya Setu handles your Location Data MyGov CEO

Within weeks of its launch, NITI Aayog’s Aarogya Setu, the Covid-19 contact tracing app has 9 crore users in India.

One of the main, and perhaps the most important, a question that users were asking is what happens to their data and how the Indian government manages it.

MyGov India CEO Abhishek Singh: “The app only takes basic data. And as we’ve specified in the privacy policy of the app, all personal data is collected only once, and that is encrypted and then a device ID is created and subsequent to that all interactions happen only with the device ID.”

Abhishek Singh has said the app will store all of your data in the device itself. Nevertheless, if you are Covid-19 positive, then only the data is submitted in encrypted form to the government servers. “Only in the situation where you are identified as Covid-19 positive, your location and Bluetooth data are sent to the server in an encrypted form, for the sole intention of alerting anyone you have been in touch within the last 14 days.”

“And if you look at the experience of other countries, whether it’s China, whether it’s the US, whether it’s Spain, whether it’s South Korea or Singapore, with the kind of strategies which are there, there is a finite time limit, in which this pandemic will be contained. And once that is done, there will be no need of such an app,” Singh Said.

Finally, when talking about introducing Aarogya Setu in feature phones, the CEO of MyGov.in revealed that the government is already working on a version of the software that will run on Jio Phones. They need to make a custom version of Aarogya Setu for this, which will work on KaiOS.

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