Pushing back against the steady hum of privacy concerns from critics of India's Aarogya Setu contact tracing app, MyGov CEO Abhishek Singh emphatically defended the app as the safest across all mobile apps that Indians currently use and a digital public good that Indians should be "proud" of.
MyGov developed the Aarogya Setu app and launched it in April.
"There is no other app that anyone in India is using today that has greater privacy features than what Aarogya Setu has", he told IANS in a video interview Tuesday.
"Critics will be there, we welcome them. Sometimes what they say makes us strive harder and ensure(s) that what we do is in the best interests of the people of India."
Baptiste Robert, a French security researcher, in a May 6 Medium blog post under his online pseudonym Elliot Alderman, said he was able to spoof his location and zoom in on the location of infected users.
MyGov responded pointwise to Robert's security concerns and cranked up its communication around privacy FAQs and the small details. On May 11, for instance, when Aarogya Setu had 98.5 million downloads, it pushed out information that data of "only 0.013 per cent" of all users were uploaded to the server to identify Bluetooth contacts and alert them.
Singh's remarks to IANS come on a day when the app at the heart of India's contact tracing effort has been downloaded 107 million times in a country with a smartphone user base of about 500 million.
Singh said Bluetooth contacts of confirmed Covid-19 cases on the Aarogya Setu app have begun to turn up a 23 per cent positivity rate for the coronavirus and are helping identify hotspots "seven days faster" than what's possible without the app.
"Among those who have been identified as bluetooth contacts of Covid-19 positive, when we do the testing, the positive rate we are getting is almost 23 per cent."