The Indian Police force, the center, and the state governments are set to use location-tracking on smartphones to detect possible coronavirus infected patients and therefore containing the spread of the COVID-19 disease.
Applications on Google and Apple stores that allow citizens to track whether they came in contact with infected patients are gaining more traction. The location of these apps is matched with the government database of the infected person and thereby alerting users if they have come in contact or not.
Applications already Developed
Corona Kavach, an application launched by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, is a similar app that depends on the citizen to voluntarily enter information. On the other hand, Niti Ayog is planning to develop a more advanced application – COWIN-20 – that used location and Bluetooth to analyze the proximity of the user.
The Delhi-based Innefu Labs have gone a step ahead and developed an application called Unmaze which will inform the authorities if the quarantined users break away from their boundary. Innefu Labs is the same company that created the Automated Facial Recognition System that was used by the Home Ministry to identify rioters.
While other companies too are developing applications, some have also used geolocation to create informative and attractive maps about the coronavirus infection. According to Nikhil Kumar, the head of the HERE Technologies, the maps can also be used by relief providers and authorities to plan their activities based on the infection rate in a region. The data for such comes from official sources.
Having said that, India is neither the first country nor not the only country to be implementing surveillance-based containment techniques. Other countries like China where the virus outbreak was first reported also used CCTV footages and credit card transaction details to track infected people. Since the technology already exists and is easy to incorporate, there isn’t much investment to be made and hence these apps can be rolled out soon.
However, for these applications to work at full capacity, the location of the user needs to be tracked in real-time which is a challenge. There is another concern, despite other countries employing similar techniques, there hasn’t been evidence of a significant contribution of these applications in containing the outbreak.
