Aarogya Setu app downloaded by 9 crore people, claims government

Aarogya Setu app was launched on April 2 as a contact tracing app. The app has been prepared to fight Covid-19. This app uses Bluetooth and GPS on the user’s mobile to provide information about other coronavirus infected users nearby. Within a few days of its launch, the Arogya Setu app was downloaded crores of times and now according to the latest information, this app has been downloaded by more than 9 crore people till May 4. One reason for this is that recently the government had made this app mandatory for all government and private sector employees.

Officials gave this news on Tuesday during the 14th meeting of the Group of Ministers (GoM) on COVID-19. In this meeting the officials also discussed various aspects related to the “performance, impact and benefits” of the Aarogya Setu app.

As we mentioned, the Arogya Setu mobile application helps users to identify whether they are at risk of COVID-19 or not. It also provides many important information to people including ways to avoid coronavirus and its symptoms. However, since its launch, some groups have called this app a threat to the privacy of users and criticized it.

Not only this, Robert Baptiste, a French security researcher, claimed that the Aarogya Setu app contains a “security loophole”, a problem which has put the privacy of crores of Indians at stake. The researcher tweeted on Tuesday to inform the government and his over 1.67 lakh followers about an alleged security issue in the government’s contact tracing app. However, it is also learned that the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and National Informatics Center (NIC) immediately contacted this hacker to understand the problem and later refuted this hacker’s claim.

The government on Wednesday said there is no data or security loophole in Aarogya Setu after an ethical hacker claimed potential security issues in the app and drew criticism from opposition Congress leaders.