Aarogya Setu (India)
India’s Aarogya Setu is probably one of the more privacy-invasive contact tracing apps to be released by a democratic country, not only because it makes wide use of location data, but also because the country is making it mandatory for millions of people to use. In fact, it’s the only democratic nation in the world that’s doing this.
Naturally, Aarogya Setu isn’t using Apple’s APIs, but the population of India combined with the threat of reprisals for those who aren’t installing it has actually caused it to hit 50 million downloads within the first two weeks of its release.
Although officially, downloading the app is “voluntary,” government employees are required to use, at least if they want to keep their jobs, and many private employers have followed suit. In fact, even landlords are mandating the use of it by tenants who don’t want to be evicted, and at least one city is reportedly fining anybody who fails to install the app on their iPhone. In fact, it’s a classic example of an app that’s going against everything that Apple prohibits contact tracing apps from doing with its own APIs, including monitoring citizens in COVID-19 containment zones to enforce mandatory quarantines.