MIT Just Gives 2 Stars Out Of 5 For ArogyaSetu Application

Arogya Setu… This mobile application has been launched in order to trace the Covid-19 positive contacts. This application is developed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology with both public and private partnership under the guidance of NIC.

This app tracks your location and helps you see whether any person is infected with Corona in your area through the Bluetooth. This way the Government will also know the details of the people who came in contact with Corona positive patient.

But unfortunately, the MIT gives out only 2 stars out of 5 stating it a weak one among other countries' Covid-19 tracing applications.ArogyaSetu has been launched in order to flatten the COVID-19 curve and also to trace the contacts of the Corona positive victim.

Till now, a total of 9.8 crore people in India have downloaded this application in their smartphones and are helping the Government to find out the contacts of Corona positive victim. But as one need to give out access for location and Bluetooth proximity, hackers can easily trace the personal data from this app.

Thus the experts from MIT have reviewed all COVID-19 tracing applications from around 25 countries and gave a low rating for our ArogyaSetu.

The Covid-19 applications are reviewed on the basis of 5 parameters… They are:

1. It is voluntary or not?–This simply means the citizens of the country should not be compelled to download it.

2. Solely used for public health purposes– According to this, the data collected should only be used for health purposes rather than law enforcement purposes.

3. Is the data collection minimized? – This parameter lies on the point whether the collected information is used for the right intentions and only restricted to contacts tracing?

4. Data collected by the app should be deleted/destroyed within a limited period – This parameter states that the info collected should be deleted after the Covid-19 rules out from the country.

5. Transparency of all the features– According to this parameter, all the policies designed for this application should be clear and made on the open-source codebase.

Well, ArogyaSetu was only scored on the 3rd and 4th parameters. This simply means ArogyaSetu isn't a game-changer for India as it fails to score on other 3 parameters.