The Government of India launched the MyGov Corona Helpdesk chatbot to provide accurate information about the coronavirus to the people. Two million people have used this chatbot so far. This chatbot who works on Artificial Intelligence has been created by Haptic(Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms ). Reliance Jio has acquired Mumbai-based Haptik for about Rs 700 crore with 87% stake in this company.

World Bank Praises India's Arogya Setu App Meant to Contact Trace and Curb Covid-19. In another initiatives towards controlling the pandemic, The government has set-up Aarogya Setu App, a Government of India to stop the spread of CO.VID-19, has recently launched the app to use people's location services and Bluetooth to deal with the risk of getting the virus.

“India leads the way in contact tracing for Covid-19: privacy first by design, secure, robust and scalable to billion users. Glad to see Apple and Google joining hands to develop contact tracing on the lines of Aarogya Setu,” NITI Aayog Amitabh Kant said on Twitter, tagging Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

The app supports 11 languages, including English and Hindi. The app is available on both Android and iOS. Ever since it was launched, the app has had over 10 million downloads on Android alone. The app tracks the movement of users and notifies them when it suspected they have come in contact with someone tested positive for CO.VID-19 by using the device’s location service.

Aarogya Setu is an important step in our fight against COVID-19. By leveraging technology, it provides important information. As more and more people use it, it’s effectiveness will increase. Experts says, the government track citizen movements, store information in perpetuity, and share the information with any other agency for any other purpose.

Another expert says, Aarogya Setu, app to track the real-time movements of citizens to determine if they have been in the proximity of COVID-19 patients, vastly expands the surveillance capabilities of the state with few explicit safeguards warned privacy experts and cybersecurity analysts.

Digital technologies can also be used to monitor the spread of Covid-19. Such initiatives, largely voluntary, have been successful in helping combat the pandemic in East Asia. Incentives also can be provided to those who report symptoms.

This allows Aarogya Setu to create a social graph of a user by tracking everyone they have been close to. Combining this data with existing government databases - many of which are already seeded with the mobile numbers of citizens - can significantly expand the government’s powers of surveillance, privacy experts said.

The Aarogya Setu’s user agreement states that the data can be used in the future for purposes other than epidemic control if there is a legal requirement. The app’s privacy policy says the personal information harvested by Aargoya Setu will not be shared with “third parties”, but makes clear that this data may be shared with as many agencies as the government sees fit.

“Such personal information may also be shared with such other necessary and relevant persons as may be required in order to carry out necessary medical and administrative interventions,” the policy states.Aarogya Setu has been downloaded over 10 million times since it was released last week, largely due to a concerted push by various government ministries. When a person registers on the Aarogya Setu app, they upload their name, phone number, age, sex, profession, travel history, and smoking history. The data is encrypted and transferred to a server.

The government assigns a unique identifier to the phone, and when two registered phones are near each other, they exchange unique identifiers, which are stored on government servers. If a person is found be infected with the novel coronavirus, all the people they were near in the past, as identified through their unique ids generated by Aarogya Setu, are notified.

The government has been on a drive to popularise the app and has explained that adequate precautions have been taken with regard to privacy. Legal experts also said there are three features that have been built into Aarogya Setu to preserve privacy. It is also unclear which government agency is overseeing the database and data collection.

Aarogya Setu’s privacy policy states that data will be deleted after 30 days from the phone, but the information collected by the app could exist in perpetuity on the government’s servers. The policy states that other than COVID-19 response, the information could be used “to comply with a legal requirement.” As India does not have a data protection law, so people cannot hold app developers accountable for privacy violations. However, the government has taken adequate precautions have been taken with regard to privacy.

Other than Aarogya Setu, One way to ensure transparency is to have a transparent and auditable algorithm, the study states, where Researchers can look at the data points being collected and transferred.