Virus tracing app raises privacy concerns in India
NEW DELHI (DNA) — As India enters an extended coronavirus lockdown, the government is actively pursuing contact tracing to help control infections. At the heart of the effort in the country of 1.3 billion people is a government-run smartphone app that critics say endangers civil liberties in how it uses location services and centralizes data collection.
In April, India launched the Aarogya Setu app, which helps people identify whether they have been near someone who tested positive for the virus. Since then, the app has been downloaded more than 90 million times in a country with a smartphone user base of about 500 million. To popularize it, a campaign featuring Bollywood celebrities was launched.
But the monitoring technology, which uses GPS and Bluetooth, has prompted a raft of questions about privacy, security and potential data breaches — and whether it gives the government snooping powers.
“Aarogya Setu is a form of surveillance and inflicts tangible privacy injury,” said Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation.
On Wednesday, Ravi Shankar Prasad, a senior minister, said the app was “robust” in terms of privacy protection and data security. The government also said no data or security breach had been identified with the app after a French security researcher exposed a flaw he said could allow virus carriers to be pinpointed.
Mobile tracing apps to help contain infections have already been developed in the U.S., China, Singapore, Australia and many European countries. Other countries are scrambling to deploy their own smartphone tools and tech giants Apple and Google have jointly devised a software solution designed to preserve user privacy and avoid the kind of amassing of user data on centralized servers done by India.
But India’s approach is most alarming, in a country lacking a data privacy law, because sweeping orders have made the app mandatory for many.
The government requires the Aarogya Setu app be used by all workers, both private and public, and by members of the military. Installation of the app is also mandatory in regions declared as containment zones. Stranded Indians abroad who wish to be repatriated also need to install it on their mobile phones before entering the country.
Now, the police are stepping in.
In Noida, a burgeoning satellite town half an hour’s drive from New Delhi, police have made it a punishable offense if people don’t use the app.
App users must answer questions posed by a chatbot about whether they have any COVID-19 symptoms, pre-existing health conditions and about their travel history. Those suspected of being infected are contacted by health authorities, who track cases in a database.
Millions of Indians, many oblivious of any privacy concerns, have enthusiastically downloaded the app at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s urging. Some businesses have said their employees cannot work without the app.
“It will be very good if almost everyone uses it,” said Umesh Ram, a food delivery rider.
But some are cautious.
Satish Kumar Rastogi, an electrician, recently deleted the app from his phone. “Imagine if I put wrong details by mistake, then it will give wrong information about me,” Rastogi said.
The government has not said if it plans to impose fines on people who don’t install the app, but hopes that if infections are tracked with the help of the app, more people will be able to resume at least part of their normal routines. India is the hardest-hit country in South Asia, with over 56,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and more than 1,800 deaths.
Critics fear the database could be breached by hackers and the monitoring technology used to collect personal information and exert social control. The app is vague about which government departments will have access.
Abhishek Singh, the chief executive of MyGovIndia, which developed Aarogya Setu, said the app “will not reveal anyone’s personal details”
But French security researcher, Baptiste Robert, said in a blog post Wednesday that he was able to modify the app to pinpoint the location of infected users. Writing under his online pseudonym Elliot Alderman, he said he was able to spoof his location in order to look anywhere in India for infected users.
Privacy rights organisations are urging the government to make the app’s source code public to increase transparency.
The monitoring technology is also opposed by the main opposition Congress party. Last week its leader, Rahul Gandhi, called the app “a sophisticated surveillance system.”
India is not new to privacy violations and data breaches. In 2018, a controversial billion-member biometric database called “Aadhaar” was breached, putting the identity details of more than 1 billion citizens at risk.
Similar cases of data breaches have been reported during the pandemic.
Many Indian states published quarantine lists on their official websites which included names of people who were suspected of being virus carriers. The app, experts say, presents similar concerns but on a much larger scale.
Apart from the privacy concerns, there is little evidence that the app will be effective without widespread virus testing, which India lacks. India is testing around 75,000 samples daily. Health experts say this number is not enough.
A recent study by epidemiologists at Oxford University estimated that 60% of the population in any given area need to use a contact tracing technology, combined with other measures such as broader testing and the quarantining of vulnerable people, for the app to be able to contain the virus.
“India has to couple contact tracing technology with far more broader testing. Testing is the primary solution to halt the infection spread,” said Dr. Anant Bhan, a public health and bioethics expert.
United States in talks with chipmakers about building US factories
(DNA) – The Trump administration is in talks with semiconductor companies about building chip factories in the United States, representatives from two chipmakers said on Sunday.
Intel Corp is in discussions with the United States Department of Defense over improving domestic sources for microelectronics and related technology, Intel spokesman William Moss said in an emailed statement.
“Intel is well positioned to work with the U.S. government to operate a U.S.-owned commercial foundry and supply a broad range of secure microelectronics”, the statement added.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), on the other hand, has been in talks with the U.S. Department of Commerce about building a U.S. factory but said it has not made a final decision yet.
“We are actively evaluating all the suitable locations, including in the U.S., but there is no concrete plan yet”, TSMC spokeswoman Nina Kao said in a statement.
Intel Chief Executive Bob Swan wrote a letter to the Department of Defense in late March in which he expressed the company’s willingness to build a foundry – a term used in the industry to reference a chip factory – in partnership with the Pentagon.
“This is more important than ever, given the uncertainty created by the current geopolitical environment”, Swan wrote in the letter dated March 30 and seen by Reuters on Sunday.
It comes amid increasing diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and China during the coronavirus outbreak, with both sides trading barbs over who is to blame for the spread of the disease after already being involved in trade tensions for almost two years.
“We currently think it is in the best interest of the United States and of Intel to explore how Intel could operate a commercial U.S. foundry to supply a broad range of microelectronics,” the letter from the Intel CEO added.
The Trump administration’s discussions with chipmakers were reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal, with the report adding that TSMC also has been talking with Apple Inc, one of its largest customers, about building a chip factory in the United States.
Sony suspends PlayStation Store in China to upgrade security
HONG KONG (DNA) – Sony has suspended its PlayStation Store in China saying it wanted to improve the online store’s security, in a move that will temporarily prevent it from selling games in the world’s largest video game market.
PlayStation China announced the closure in a statement on its Weibo account on Sunday, saying it was for a “system security upgrade” without providing further details.
It also did not specify a reopening date.
The closure, however, comes on the heels of reports on social media that China PlayStation users were able to switch to overseas services via a backdoor and circumvent China’s restrictions to download unlicensed games.
Sony declined to comment on whether the reports had played a role in the closure and said the target of the temporary shutdown was to enhance the safety of the store’s services.
Coronavirus outbreak: Meera pays tribute to doctors, paramedics
LAHORE (Dunya News) – Pakistani actress Meera has lauded the efforts of doctors and paramedical staff in treating the patients suffering from coronavirus on frontline.
In a video message, the actress said that she salutes the doctors for working day and night without the availability of proper facilities.
Meera said that these doctors and paramedical staff have devoted their lives for the safety of people of Pakistan.
New Zealand to end coronavirus lockdown
WELLINGTON (dna) – New Zealand will phase out its coronavirus lockdown over the next 10 days after successfully containing the virus, although some restrictions will remain, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Monday.
Ardern said that from Thursday shopping malls, restaurants, cinemas and playgrounds will reopen — with the country moving to Level Two on its four-tier system.
The 39-year-old leader warned “none of us can assume COVID is not with us” but said New Zealand currently had only 90 active cases after a seven-week lockdown.
“Your efforts New Zealand have got us to this place ahead of most of the world and without the carnage that COVID has inflicted in many other places,” she said in a televised address.
“But there are risks ahead, so please be vigilant.”
New Zealand, with a population of five million has recorded 1,147 coronavirus cases, including 21 deaths.
The number of new cases has been in single digits since mid-April, with three new infections recorded on Monday.
Under Level Two restrictions, international borders remain closed but life domestically will return to something approaching normality.
While social distancing must still be followed, the advice that people isolate themselves at home and “stick to your bubble” will no longer apply.
“This is a transition out of our bubbles, you can see people you haven’t seen in a while, you just can’t do it all at once,” Ardern said.
“At Level Two we are out and about again, just about all parts of the economy are opening up again.”
The lockdown was first eased two weeks ago, allowing food takeaways and resumption of some recreational activities, but the freedoms granted by the latest relaxation will be far greater.
Those aged over 70 will be allowed out again after more than seven weeks of mandatory quarantine.
Domestic travel will be allowed, providing a boost to the crippled tourism industry and schools will fully reopen next Monday.
Bars will not be back in business until May 21, giving them extra time to ensure they can keep patrons properly separated.
Team sport will also return, with planning already underway to start a domestic version of Super Rugby on June 13 involving the competition’s five New Zealand-based teams.
Ardern said the move to Level Two would be reassessed after two weeks, with further easing possible depending on developments.
Iran friendly fire missile strike in drill kills 19 sailors
TEHRAN (dna) — An Iranian missile fired during a training exercise in the Gulf of Oman struck a support vessel near its target, killing 19 Iranian sailors and wounding 15, Iran’s military and state media said Monday, amid heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington.
The statement significantly raised the death toll in Sunday’s incident from what was reported just hours earlier, when Iran’s state media said at least one sailor was killed.
The Konarak, a Hendijan-class support ship, which was taking part in the exercise, was too close to a target during an exercise on Sunday when the incident happened, the reports said. The vessel had been putting targets out for other ships to target. The media said the missile struck the vessel accidentally.
The friendly fire incident took place near the port of Jask, some 1,270 kilometers (790 miles) southeast of Tehran, in the Gulf of Oman, state TV said.
A local hospital admitted 12 sailors and treated another three with slight wounds, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.
Iranian media said the Konarak had been overhauled in 2018 and was able to launch sea and anti-ship missiles. The Dutch-made, 47-meter (155-foot) vessel was in service since 1988 and had capacity of 40 tons. It usually carries a crew of 20 sailors.
Iran towed the Konarak into a nearby naval base after the strike. A photograph released by the Iranian army showed burn marks and some damage to the vessel, though the military did not immediately offer detailed photographs of the site of the missile’s impact.
Iran regularly holds exercises in the region, which is close to the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which 20% of the world’s oil passes. The U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, which monitors the region, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Iranian media rarely report on mishaps during exercises by the country’s armed forces, signaling the severity of the incident. It also comes amid months of heightened tensions between Iran and the U.S. since President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers in 2018 and imposed crushing sanctions on the country.
It marks the second serious incident involving a misfired missile by Iran’s armed forces this year. In January, after attacking U.S. forces in Iraq with ballistic missiles, Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard accidentally shot down a Ukrainian jetliner, killing all 176 people on board.
Restart or re-stop? Countries reopen amid second-wave fears
PARIS (dna) — Plastic spacing barriers and millions of masks appeared Monday on the streets of Europe’s newly reopened cities, as France and Belgium emerged from lockdowns, the Netherlands sent children back to school and Spain let people eat outdoors.
All faced the delicate balance of trying to restart their battered economies without causing a second wave of coronavirus infections.
Fears of infection spikes have been borne out over the past few days in Germany, where new clusters were linked to three slaughterhouses; in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus started; and in South Korea, where a single nightclub customer was linked to 85 new cases.
With Monday’s partial reopening, the French did not have to carry forms allowing them to leave their homes. Crowds formed at some metro stations in Paris, one of France’s viral hot spots, but the city’s notorious traffic jams were absent and only about half the stores on the Champs-Elysees were open.
Hairdressers in the city planned to charge a fee for the disposable protective gear they will have to give to customers. Walk-ins will be a thing of the past, said Brigitte L’Hoste, manager of the Hair de Beauté salon.
“The face of beauty will change, meaning clients won’t come here to relax. Clients will come because they need to,” said Aurelie Bollini, a beautician at the salon. “They will come and aim at getting the maximum done in the shortest time possible.”
In Greece, Smaragda Petridou was out buying beauty products. “Look, I’m not afraid to go in when the protection measures are being adhered to,” she said. “We’ll shop. What can we do? So the shops can survive, too.”
In Germany, gyms reopened in the most populous state, but authorities there and in France have warned that a rise in the daily number of infections could lead to new restrictions..
In South Korea, the government pushed back hard against new infections, halting the school reopenings that had been planned for this week and reimposing restrictions on nightclubs and bars. It is trying to track down 5,500 people who had visited a popular Seoul entertainment district by checking credit-card transactions, cellphone records and security camera footage.
In China, Shanghai Disneyland reopened to visitors but let in only limited numbers and demanded that they wear face masks and have their temperatures checked.
Roughly half of Spain’s 47 million people shifted into a softer version of the country’s strict confinement, beginning to socialize, shop in small stores and enjoy outdoor seating in restaurants and bars. Its biggest cities, Madrid and Barcelona, remained under lockdown as the country reported the lowest numbers of coronavirus-related deaths and infections since March 17.
Spanish hotels were allowed to open as long as they don’t let guests mix in public areas. But with people not allowed to travel outside their provinces and few flights from overseas, the prospects were bleak.
Unfortunately this year’s business is lost already. It’s going to be catastrophic,” said Manuel Domínguez, manager at Seville’s Doña María Hotel.
Alfonso Polo, owner of four restaurants in a central square of the coastal city of Tarragona, Spain, opened 40 of his 90 outdoor seats. He said he expects to lose money for the next two or three weeks.
“At first it’s going to be very difficult, but we hope that slowly we’ll be able to recover. People are very eager to go out. That’s very clear,” he said,
In Belgium, Brussels’ City2 shopping mall reopened, and “everyone was impatient to open their shops, see their customers, so it is a relief despite the tremendous work they did to adapt their shops, to create paths with entries and exits for customers,” said manager Jurgen De Gelas.
Nearby, Omar Marrakchi bought a television.
“When I enter a shop, I thank every shop owner,” he said. “I thank them and I wish them good luck because we all have to be united and just a small ‘thank you,’ a small ‘good luck,’ is not much, but if everybody does it and follows the rules, we should be all right.”
In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a modest easing of the country’s lockdown but urged citizens not to squander the progress made. Some people, however, were confused as the government shifted its slogan from “Stay at Home” to “Stay Alert.” Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland stuck with the old motto.
People in jobs that cannot be done at home “should be actively encouraged to go to work” this week, Johnson said. He also set a goal of June 1 to begin reopening schools and shops if Britain can control new infections. Johnson himself is the only world leader to suffer a serious bout of COVID-19. “We will be driven not by mere hope or economic necessity,” he promised. “We’re going to be driven by the science.”
At London’s Waterloo train station, not everyone was convinced. “I am nervous about going back, because I have a family and they have been isolating since the start. I feel like I am now putting them at risk,” said Peter Osu, 45, who was returning to work at a construction site.
In the U.S., Trump administration officials spoke optimistically about a relatively quick rebound from the pandemic — but then announced that Vice President Mike Pence is “self-isolating” after an aide tested positive. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin predicted the American economy will rebound in the second half of this year from unemployment rates unseen since the Great Depression.
The U.S. has seen 1.3 million confirmed infections and about 80,000 deaths, the most in the world by far, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Worldwide, 4 million people have been reported infected and more than 280,000 have died, over 150,000 of them in Europe. Health experts believe all those numbers understate the true toll of the outbreak.
Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington institute that has created a widely cited model projecting the course of the outbreak, said that moves by states to reopen businesses “will translate into more cases and deaths in 10 days from now.” Infections and deaths are going up more than expected in Illinois, Arizona, Florida and California, he said.
India reported its biggest daily increase in coronavirus cases Monday as it prepared to resume train service to ease a lockdown that has hit migrant workers and their hungry families especially hard.
Kh Asif criticizes govt over lack of planning to curb COVID-19
ISLAMABAD (Dna) – Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Khawaja Asif on Monday said that the 18th amendment should not be revisited as the matter has already been resolved.
Speaking on the floor of the Lower House of the Parliament, he said while responding to Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s speech about PML-N’s 10 year in government, that all the coronavirus test were being conducted at the institutions built by his party.
Khawaja Asif said that seven institutions in South Punjab from Jinnah Hospital to Tayyap Erdogan Hospital had been built during the PML-N’s tenure.
The former federal minister said that the government even failed to prepare a plan for the prevention from coronavirus and now medicines worth billions of rupees had been imported from India.
The PML-N leader went on to say that the current situation that we are in is due to the negligence of the government, adding that the entire country was completely shut down when we had fewer deaths but now that with the spike in number of cases, the government is easing lockdown restrictions.
“Doctors, nurses and paramedics are fighting valiantly and I salute them on behalf of the nation,” he said. “They are our frontline soldiers but did we provide them with weapons to fight effectively,” he asked.
Khawaja Asif demanded that a House committee be formed to check the facilities in quarantine centers all over Pakistan from Taftan.
Pakistan’s COVID-19 testing capacity highest in South Asia: FM Qureshi
ISLAMABAD (DNA) – Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has said that the coronavirus has gripped the entire globe and everyone must play their part in overcoming it. He said that Health has become a provincial article after the passing of 18th amendment.
Expressing these views during the special National Assembly session on Monday, the Minister said that coronavirus has wreaked havoc all across the globe and all countries are in a state of crisis. The virus has spread to 209 countries and no country has been able to fend it off completely. He said that tens of thousands of people have died due to coronavirus in countries such as United States, United Kingdom and Italy.
Shah Mahmood said that developing countries are especially in crisis due to the coronavirus, the likes of which has not been seen since the Second World War He said that the first case in Pakistan was reported on February 26 at which time our testing capacity was just 100, it has now been raised to multiple thousands. There are around 70 laboratories which have testing facilities and Pakistan has the best testing capability among all South Asian countries.
The Minister further said that taking into account the views of the opposition, his government has convened special National Assembly meeting to discuss Covid-19. He said that Health is a provincial article after the 18th amendment; Sindh is under the government of Pakistan People’s Party for the past 12 years while Punjab was ruled by Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) for 10 consecutive years yet the Health sector was never given any attention. He said that even though the country’s Health System is not the strongest, the government has taken important steps on time to control the coronavirus.
