More people are willing to share their location since the pandemic started to keep track of the virus.

In today’s age where our privacy and date is abused, we are very careful about sharing our private information especially our location however due to the pandemic there has not only been changes in situation but these changes have also happened to our priorities. Our priority is now our health and now the data privacy which was so important to us before the world was hit by COVID19.

To curb the spread of the virus health officials’ major job has been to find, identify and isolate the infected and contacts of the infected people and all of this has to be done before the people in contact can become new sets of carriers to others giving rise to an uncontrollable vicious chain of events.This kind of tracing is the main way of infectious disease control but to do it in  very huge number in such pandemic situation is not possible effectively without the help of digitised technologies.

To do this more effectively many teams globally have started a more modern approach that is much safer and accurate however this does invade the privacy of the people in order to obtain the data they need for contact tracing. 

India’s own version of Oxford team’s approach of digital contact tracing manifested in the app known as Aarogya Setu which lets the officials perform contract tracing, syndromic mapping and also assists with self assessment. The app has over 100 million installations in 40 days and that itself goes to show that people are much more willing to compromise on their privacy if it helps them in keeping themselves safe and assured that it is for a good or worthy cause.