Aarogya Setu - Carrying Your Privacy in Your Hands?

Abstract

There are numerous benefits of having a data protection legislation in place to guide a nation in how to protect the personal data of individuals. These guiding factors maybe transparency, accountability, ensuring rights of the individuals, listing out organizational measures and the compliance to be undertaken, to name a few. In the current context of having contact tracing apps, it becomes all the more important to have a data protection legal framework. The article seeks to understand the privacy concerns spelled out by the Aarogya Setu App, briefly compare the same with practices across different countries and understanding the need for legislative action concerning the privacy issues. In absence of a legislation, compliance with the privacy principles is not enough. The absence of a national or applicable law that posits data protection principles, provisions and organizational measures, should not permit denial of the basic tenets and continued provision of basic minimum rights of personal data protection and privacy, which must be ensured to all individuals at all times. Finally, it must be borne in mind that the adoption of contact tracing apps will put to test the balance between state surveillance and user privacy. The need of a data protection legislation is very telling in the current times and speaks for itself.