COVID-19 could transform India into a surveillance state.

This article is part of Confidentiality in the event of a pandemic, a Future Tense series.

In India, the COVID-19 crisis is proving to be the perfect pretext for the government to consolidate its ambitions for pre-pandemic surveillance. Since May 4, when restrictions began to loosen, the government has mandated the installation of its smartphone application for contact tracing for anyone who works for the government, a private company or in the economy or uses public transport. Failure to do so is criminal, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. (People without smartphones are supposed to show up in a interactive voice response system.) Not surprisingly, digital rights and civil society organizations are repelling on the new directive.

Known as Aarogya Setu, the app was criticized from the start for its lack of data protection for users. Aarogya Setu, which is available in 11 languages, has self-assessment tools to check if users may be at risk. It also informs users if they have encountered a patient with a positive COVID-19 and provides information on self-isolation. The application guarantees that user information is secure and all data is anonymized, but questions remain on the collection of information, the limitation of purposes and the storage of data. On May 5, a white hat pirate named Robert Baptiste even calls out the creator of the app, the National Informatics Center, for certain disturbing privacy breaches that could lead to disclosure of COVID-19 patient locations. Despite the evidence, the NIC Refused that user data was in danger.

Upon installation, the app prompts users to submit six data points (including name, age, gender, and travel history), which are then exported to an external server. That says Sidharth Deb of Internet Freedom Foundation, an organization of digital freedoms in India, is worrying. * There is no clarity on who can access the server, no sunset clause (i.e., no time when the data will be permanently deleted), and no transparency on how the data are anonymized. Deb calls it a classic case of technological solutionism, technology deployed without adequate dialogue as to whether, first, effective and second, what are the guarantees [are] to ensure that these systems will not be abused.

There are already alarming signs of mission creep with Aarogya Setu, who was initially a volunteer. We are talking about a new fitness group monitoring device which will integrate with the application. The application is already used as e-pass, allowing you to travel (it would obligatory for those who wish to fly) and can be linked to telehealth providers. It is likely that new smartphones will be supplied with the application Pre installed.

There is a real danger that Aarogya Setu could be a gateway to national surveillance. National security, personal security, dispersal of essential services and now disease surveillance for the past few years, the Indian government has used all of these elements as pretexts to increasingly invade privacy. The country has already experienced a frantic movement towards digitization, automation and surveillance, and the COVID-19 crisis has added a new layer to this, which could have far-reaching humanitarian, social and economic consequences.

Activists have been fighting with the government for years biometric identification project called Aadhaar. It is a unique 12-digit number that the authorities wish to assign to each Indian citizen, linked to their fingerprints and retinal scanners. Presented as a tool to eliminate illegal subsidy transfers and reduce corruption, Aadhaar has seen an alarming scope creeping in. It is now linked, often without consent, to mobile phone connections, bank accounts, tax identification numbers, pension plans, passports, electoral identity cards, etc. The Aadhaar database would be compromise, resulting in millions of false accounts, cases of Fraud activated by Aadhaar, poor orientation of social protection systems, and monitoring of specific demographic groups.

The right-wing government of the Bharatiya Janata party has also attempted to create a national registry of citizens, ostensibly to eliminate illegal immigrants. But it’s more alarming when viewed in conjunction with the Citizenship Law, passed in late 2019 and widely regarded as anti-Muslim. The act sparked numerous protests across the country, the most famous being the one led by women. Shaheen Bagh sit-in in Delhi. The protest and other peaceful protests across the country have been interrupted by the pandemic. Since then, the government has used lockdown coverage to (illegally) detain several key protesters due to allegations of riots. It is this legacy that makes many people fear that COVID-19 monitoring measures will turn into very different types of monitoring tools.

Vidya Subramanian, who works on the sociology of technology at the Center for Policy Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, says that most people buy the myth that a little bit of data is a small price to pay for security, but we define it. These little incursions then become forever normal. The public health crisis is used to push technological developments which we do not yet know will work. This is how you establish an authoritarian regime, [and] really bad practices for extracting usable data, she says.*

Marginalized populations, women, LGBTQ people, the poor, sex workers, religious minorities find themselves disproportionately exploited in these systems. There are already signs that race, caste and Indian religious prejudice ignited by the right-wing government and its goal of creating a Hindu nation will be exacerbated post-COVID-19, creating a perfect playground for trying restrictive technologies.

Some level of surveillance may be necessary to contain the pandemic, says Radhika Radhakrishnan of Internet Democracy Project. But currently, the state is less focused on monitoring the virus, and more on monitoring the bodies of people. She and others have pointed out that measures such as contact tracing cannot be entirely technology-focused. It is imperative to have humans in the loop and to have meaningful alternatives for those who do not have access to technology.

Future Tense
is a partnership of
Slate,
New america, and
Arizona State University
which examines emerging technologies, public policy and society.