Beware! You Are Being Monitored Every Second

As the web of social media or artificial intelligence expanded over the past decade, so did the controversy surrounding it, spurring a debate over privacy concerns. India has now become one of the leading centres of this global debate.

Phone tapping is an old method used by government intelligence services. Successive governments of our country, too,have often been caught tapping phones or eavesdropping on citizens, but in a somewhat controlled manner, following specific rules and regulations.

Howver, in June 2014, a new aspect of surveillance of citizens was unveiled, right after the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government came to power in Delhi. In the name of the slogan ‘Digital India’, different Apps started appearing on scene. A new era of surveillance of citizens thus began.

Under various government instructions, all kinds of information on a citizen’s life started gettinglinked tovarious Apps.If in the first stageit was arequest or invitation to use an App, this has now been turned into an order.

Even during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the Modi government is engaged in promoting the“App culture”. Prime Minister Modi launched the ArogyaSetu App, declaring it as the ‘chief commander’ of the ‘fight’ against coronavirus. The Prime Minister’s Office had thought in the initial phase, that the App would get an excellent response. But this did not happen.

Then came the directive that every central government employee has to download ‘ArogyaSetu’ App on their mobile phones. And now, in the latest order issued on May 3, the Centre has asked all offices, public and private, to ensure that employees have this App on their phones, thereby making it mandatory.

An arrangement has been made to preload this App in all newly purchased smartphones. Bluetooth is associated with this App. In other words, with the opening of  this App, not only an individual, but all the people around that individual, will also be under government surveillance.

Who wants to die of a deadly disease without treatment? Who wants to watch family members die? When people are really sick, they do not want to hide it, they want to find a doctor, they want to get treatment. Without helping people with all these measures, issuing strict guidelines to download this App tant amounts to a kind of deception.

The main requirement for protecting people from epidemics is providing them access top roper medical facilities. Kerala is a shining example. It was there that the first coronavirus or COVID-19 case was reported. Kerala has been able to control the infection due to its efficient healthcare system. The state ranks first in health services, as mentioned in the second report on the country’s health policy, published by government ‘think tank’, NITI Aayog, in 2019. That is why Kerala could control the spread of pandemic, something that the rest of India is fidning it difficult to achieve.

Also Read: Kerala at Top, UP’s Performance Worst, Says NITI Aayog’s Health Index Report

In a country where medical infrastructure to deal with the pandemic is grossly inadequate, why is the Central government so eager to push a mobile App?There could be two reasons for this. First, it could be an attempt to cover up the overall failure of the government by keeping citizens engaged with ‘new toys’. Second, it could be used for surveillance, which will have grave consequences.

With this App, information on the daily life of citizens can now be stored in the secret archives of the government. And this confidential information could flow to any part of the world without the knowledge of citizens. It is also possible that this information could be distorted and used against citizens.

While several experts have rasied these issues, the government has no answer on these privacy concerns. On November 19, the Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, G. Kishan Reddy, had told members of the Lower House of Parliament (LokSabha) that the government had the right to monitor a citizen’s device. He had said: “Section 69 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 empowers the Central Government or a State Government to intercept, monitor or de-crypt or cause to be intercepted or monitored or de-crypted, any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource in the interest of the sovereignty ”.

However, serious doubts arise because of these sweeping provisions.For instance, Rona Wilson, one of the accused in the Bhima-Koregaon conspiracy case in Maharashtra, had his computer infected with a malware even before the police seized it, according to a report in The Caravan. The name of the malware is Win32: Trojan-Gen. If this malware infiltrates a computer or a smartphone, it means the malware can control the owner’s internet access without the knowledge of the owner and all the information stored on the computer would reach the hacker. In this case, the police have produced against Wilson a letter as a piece of evidence obtained from his computer hard disk. Now, Win32: Trojan-Gen malware can be used by any hacker to add a file without the user’s knowledge.

Of late, the mobile phone has become a tool in the hands of the Delhi Police to reportedly file false cases against civil rights activists and arrest them. As of April 5, as many as 11 Apps were launched in India at the initiative of the Central and state governments in the name of fighting the corona pandemic. Apps likeArogyaSetu, Kovid-19 Feedback, Corona Kavach of Government of India, COVA app of Punjab, Mahakavach of Maharashtra, Test Yourself Goa, Test Yourself Pondicherry, Kovid-19 Quarantine Monitor of Tamil Nadu, Quarantine Watch of Karnataka and GoK – Kerala Direct of Kerala have been launched. However, these are not mandatory.

But, the Central government has deployed all its power to push‘ArogyaSetu’. In a country that is the world’s largest parliamentary democracy, the government is forcing an App on its citizens, depriving them the right to say ‘no’.

This process of surveillance of civic life by undermining democratic rights is going on across the world.For example, controversial surveillance agencies, such as ‘Clearview AI’ (Clearview AI is an American tech-company which provides software for facial identification and claims to supply the software only to law-implementing organisations) or Palantir Technologies (Palantir Technologies, headquartered in California, is a private American software company that specialises in big data analysis) are in discussion with the US authorities to sell coronavirus tracking technology.

Israel’s NSO Group is another such surveillance company that has a dubious record of selling these technologies to different governments which do not acknowledge any obligation to honour democratic rights of their citizens. This company is now selling an extensive data analysis tool, claiming that the device tracks the spread of corona infection by mapping human movements.

And, while carrying out these mappings, different governments are flouting the privacy of the patient’s health-related information. The government of South Korea is sending instructions on how to obtain detailed personal data of the infected persons, and a hyperlink details all their movements. This move can be considered a “danger” because it violates medical confidentiality rules and opens the door to public exposure and harassment of persons infected with the virus.

Such surveillance also does not appear to meet legal requirements and violates the right to privacy. In Poland, the government has created an App to ensure quarantine. It requires an infected person to upload selfies and then uses face recognition and location data to verify whether the person is following quarantine orders or not.

Arbitrary use of modern surveillance technology to prevent outbreaks of disease should not deprive people of their privacy and pave the way for a heavily monitored society. Instead, governments should ensure prevention, treatment, and control of the corona epidemic, which has to be done jointly with the citizens and by gaining their trust.

There is a possibility of another danger. Artificial intelligence (AI) or AI-based technologies can increase the likelihood of inequality in society and inflict more harm on the marginalised sections. Most existing techniques make decisions relying upon biased data and inexact mathematical terminology or methods that increase bias against certain groups. No government should create surveillance and collect information more than what is needed to control the virus.

It is essential to mention one more thing. Since this App is targeted to address a specific problem, will it be withdrawn after the problem is solved? The fear is that this will not happen. Which reminds one of a quote in an article published in the Financial Times of London, by Israeli writer and researcher, Yuval Noah Harari,who said, “My home country of Israel, for example, declared a state of emergency during its 1948 War of Independence, which justified a range of temporary measures from press censorship and land confiscation to special regulations for making pudding (I kid you not). The War of Independence has long been won, but Israel never declared the emergency over, and has failed to abolish any of the “temporary” measures of 1948 (the emergency pudding decree was mercifully abolished in 2011).”

Harari fears that “Even when infections from coronavirus are down to zero, some data-hungry governments could argue they needed to keep the biometric surveillance systems in place because they fear a second wave of coronavirus, or because there is a new Ebola strain evolving in central Africa, or because .... ”.   This is the reality in our country as well.

The writer is a journalist based in Delhi,and is associated with various publications in West Bengal and Assam. The views are personal.