“Not installing the app will be considered a violation of lockdown orders,” said a police order released in Noida, India.
NEW DELHI — Residents of a city in India have been issued with an ultimatum: install the government’s controversial“Not installing the app will be considered as a violation of lockdown orders,” said a police order released in Noida, on the outskirts of New Delhi, on Tuesday. BuzzFeed News has reviewed the order, which was published in Hindi. Those caught without the app could face a fine of 1,000 rupees or up to six months in jail.
“This order is coercive and runs afoul of the constitutional principles of personal liberty,” said Apar Gupta, director of the Internet Freedom Foundation , a New Delhi-based digital rights organization. “If it’s challenged in court, it will be a tough case for the government to justify because it is unreasonable.” The IFF isMore than half of India’s 1.3 billion citizens do not have smartphones.
last week showed how some Indians were denied entry into pharmacies to buy medicines because they did not have the app installed. And leading food delivery companies in the country had mandated gig workers on their platforms to install the app on their phones to work. A day after the report was published, India’s government made it mandatory for all employees working for the federal government, as well as those working for private companies, to install the app.
There’s little consensus on the efficacy of contact tracing apps around the world so far. A BuzzFeed Newspublished last month showed that contact tracing efforts in the US were scattered and could provide people with a false sense of security. “To me, it’s just techies doing techie things because they don’t know what else to do,” privacy expert and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Bruce Schneier said.
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