How can we know that the person we have met is coronavirus positive or not? To address this problem contact-tracing apps are used. The contact-tracing app on your phone keeps the track of all the other phones it comes in contact with, via Bluetooth and alerts if anyone you ever met has tested corona positive. Even India also has its own contact-tracing app the Aarogya Setu app. But can the contact-tracing app beat the virus in India?

What is contact tracing?

The spread of coronavirus pandemic is decreasing and we are preparing to pick our lives back. But how do we ensure that virus will not come back. The virus will spend its time in every place where people come close together. This is where the contact-tracing comes in.

Contact tracing is the process of identifying patients with suspected or confirmed infection. Health staff interrogates people who are diagnosed with corona positive and asks them who they have recently been in contact with. Public health staff then warns these exposed contacts that they may have been exposed to a patient with the infection and educate them about preventive measures and self-quarantine process that need to be followed.

 But in this digital world, contact tracing can be automated and instantaneous. China and South Korea are already using the contact-tracing app for the past few months. Even India has its contact-tracing app Aarogya Setu app and many countries like America and Australia are about to launch their own.

What is the Aarogya Setu app?

Aarogya Setu app is a coronavirus tracking app launched by the Indian government, developed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information technology. The purpose of the Aarogya Setu app is to notify users whether they can catch Coronavirus infection. AarogyaSetu app makes use of GPS and Bluetooth to determine if a person is near or in contact with an infected person. The app also tells people about the preventive measures they can follow and tell people about the appropriate sources they can refer to cope well with the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. The app is available in 11 languages including English, Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, and many others, and need permission to access a user’s, Bluetooth, and data.

How Aarogya Setu app works

The application is available on both Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nic.goi.aarogyasetu&hl=en_IN

Here is how the application works:
1. After you’ve installed the app, the app asks for access to your location and Bluetooth.

2. You’ll get an OTP, enter it and you are ready to go.

3. The app will ask for some basic info such as age, gender, name, health status.

4. The user will also have to declare their foreign travel history in the last 30 days.

5. If one of your contact tests positive for COVID-19 then the app alerts you and provides information about self-quarantine and getting tested.

In the app, Bluetooth is always on. When two smartphones with an app installed in them come in each other’s Bluetooth range, each phone transmits unique code and saves the codes of other phones that come within range for several minutes at a time. If one of the users is positive, the other person will be alerted about the possibility of being infected. These potential cases are then notified to the government for further testing.

Limitation of Aarogya Setu app

1. Useless without testing

The contact tracing apps rely on self-reporting if you have symptoms like fever and cough and you report them on the app then app changes your status from risk-free to risky and start alerting your contacts. The problem arises when you are not showing any symptoms and still a corona positive then your phone will broadcast a risk-free status all the time. According to ICMR in India, 69% of corona-positive people were detected without corona symptoms. The best way to fix this problem is to test more and more people.

2. Privacy issues

India does not have good privacy policy measures. The Aarogya Setu collects personal and sensitive data that increases the risk of privacy leakage and leaves the data open for the government to reuse it. The app uses GPS to track every movement. The government not only knows who we are, where we are and whom we are meeting, but it also has access to our biometric information (fingerprints, voice, photo, video, navigation pattern and typing pattern) and can also use this information in ways that give it more control and power over people. The biggest fear is that phone surveillance will become part of our lives.

Till now only 6 crore people have downloaded the Aarogya Setu app which means less than 5% of the Indian population. Even if 100% population installs the Aarogya Setu app it will not work efficiently because it has major weaknesses such as a lack of testing in the country and low penetration of smartphones. It may be useful in cities with high smartphone usage, but it may not be possible to track viruses in small towns and villages where people don’t even how to operate smartphones.