[D66] Coronavirus is Pushing Mass Surveillance in India

[Antid Oto]

  Coronavirus is Pushing Mass Surveillance in India, and It’s Going to
  Change Everything

By
Pallavi Pundir
vice.com
7 min
View Original 
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vice.com%2Fen_in%2Farticle%2Fqjd9ew%2Fcoronavirus-surveillance-privacy-india>

Over the last couple of months, coronavirus has transformed many aspects 
of most of our lives—from what ‘outdoor’ and ‘freedom’ mean to us to the 
impact on our mental health 
<https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/xgqm5k/the-overwhelming-loneliness-of-a-world-emptied-by-coronavirus> 
when we can’t physically touch the people we love, to the kind of manic 
behaviours 
<https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/9398b8/why-people-hoard-toilet-paper-emergency-coronavirus> 
we are capable of when facing shortages. But if we zoom out a little, we 
see that one of the biggest changes it’s making around the world is how 
we look at surveillance and privacy—with the COVID-19 outbreak probably 
altering their definitions and boundaries forever. “The world has never 
seen this kind of a situation before,” Nikhil Pahwa, New Delhi-based 
digital rights activist and founder of digital news portal /MediaNama/, 
told VICE. “From a civil rights perspective, the challenge is of 
balancing the health of many versus the privacy of a few.”

You could see that when governments started expanding the possibilities 
of technology in their countries. Look at China, who is tracking 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/09/the-new-normal-chinas-excessive-coronavirus-public-monitoring-could-be-here-to-stay> 
people through their smartphones; or Israel, who used its 
counter-terrorism agency 
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/shin-bet-says-it-found-500-coronavirus-carriers-with-its-mass-surveillance/> 
to monitor people; or even Singapore, who is using a contact-tracing 
smartphone app 
<https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/singapore-is-using-a-high-tech-surveillance-app-to-track-the-coronavirus-keeping-schools-and-businesses-open-heres-how-it-works-/articleshow/74797714.cms> 
to track infected people.

India, too, is taking matters into its own hands. In Rajasthan, the 
government made public the personal details 
<https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2020/03/22/privacy-of-covid-19-suspects-violated-names-addresses-made-public.html> 
of those under home-quarantine. In Karnataka, they mandated all those 
quarantined to send selfies 
<https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/all-those-home-quarantined-in-state-need-to-send-selfies-to-govt-every-hour-karnataka-minister-1661517-2020-03-30> 
every hour throughout the day. Cities like Delhi had government 
officials plastering posters 
<https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/home-quarantine-posters-put-up-to-prevent-spread/articleshow/74801174.cms> 
on home-quarantined patients’ houses that revealed their names and those 
of their family members. Tamil Nadu is using a facial recognition app 
<https://www.medianama.com/2020/04/223-face-recognition-tamil-nadu-quarantine-coronavirus/> 
to track quarantined people. And then, last week, the Ministry of 
Electronics and Information Technology launched a contact tracing mobile 
app 
<https://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/mobile/government-of-india-launches-official-covid-19-tracking-app/74950482> 
called Aarogya Setu, which live-tracks the location of the users.

These measures are, of course, passed off as legitimate in the face of a 
crisis. The World Health Organisation (WHO) calls this “public health 
surveillance 
<https://www.who.int/topics/public_health_surveillance/en/>”, which is 
necessary for governments to warn and prepare for possible public health 
emergencies. So in Delhi, for instance, when the posters with personal 
details started cropping up in front of quarantined people’s homes, Dr 
Nimmi Rastogi—the coordinator at dialogue and development commission (an 
advisory body in Delhi government)—justified the move by saying that it 
is in the larger interest of the society. “At this time, I believe this 
step is fine because we have to prevent the spread and have to make 
people wary of coming in contact with those suspected to be carriers of 
coronavirus,” she told the local media 
<https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2020/03/22/privacy-of-covid-19-suspects-violated-names-addresses-made-public.html>.

[...]

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