In a written reply to Congress Lok Sabha MP Hibi Eden on whether or not the Centre responded to the incident during which a US-based tech agency was authorised by the Kerala authorities to collate, gather, and handle and deal with well being knowledge of individuals, Union Minister of State for Information and Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, on Wednesday stated no knowledge pertaining to Kerala was shared with the US tech firm.
“We are not aware of any such incident in which a US-based tech firm was authorised by the Kerala government to collate, collect, manage and handle the health data of the people. Neither was any reference made by the Kerala government in this regard as well,” he stated.
To one other query from the MP on whether or not the information collected by Aarogya Setu until May 10, 2022, was deleted in accordance with the Aarogya Setu Data Access and Knowledge Sharing Protocol, 2020, Chandrasekhar stated, “The data has been deleted in accordance with the protocol.”
“In accordance with the provisions of the Aarogya Setu Data Access and Knowledge Sharing Protocol, 2020, the contact tracing feature of the Aarogya Setu mobile application has been discontinued,” the MoS, IT stated in response to the Congress MP, who wished to know if there was a requirement to share the contact tracing knowledge collected by way of the Aarogya Setu cell utility.
Aarogya Setu is an Indian Covid-19 contact tracing, syndromic mapping and self-assessment digital service, primarily a cell utility, developed by the National Informatics Centre below the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
The app logged greater than 100 million downloads inside 40 days of its launch in April 2020, throughout the first Covid wave in India.
Â
