Smacks down Information Commission by pointing to policy and data revealing the app has probably helped quite a lot
India’s Central Information Commission has warned the nation’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology that it could face penalties under the Right to Information Act after it was found to have been “evasive” in its response to a request for information about the Aarogya Setu contact-tracing app. A Commission order [PDF] published earlier this week details a request for information lodged by an activist named Saurav Das who sought detailed information on how the app was conceived and created, including details of private sector involvement. Das suggested that insufficient safeguards for use of information gathered by the app means users are at risk, so sought information to better understand the app’s potential privacy impact. That request seems reasonable given that India claimed the app has perfect security, but then open-sourced it to make scrutiny easier and even added a bug bounty program to make that effort worth developers’ time and energty.
