Aarogya Setu will soon integrate telemedicine video consultations and "greater personalisation in terms of better data collection" in its interface, Arnab Kumar, the Program Director of Frontier Technologies at NITI Aayog who is spearheading the project on the government side, and Jay Dutta, Senior Vice President (UX Design) at MakeMyTrip and a private volunteer who developed the app, revealed during a virtual panel organised by Association of Designers of India (ADI). The app may also function as the "initial building block for India Health Stack", Kumar said, though he clarified that Aarogya Setu has no life beyond the pandemic. Telemedicine video consultations will be integrated in the app "so that people don't have to step our of their homes", Kumar said. It is not clear how so much health data will be collected and processed in a secure manner by this changing team of developers and designers, especially in the absence of a Personal Data Protection law. "Greater personalisation in terms of better data collection," Dutta said. It is not clear what would need to be personalised. One of the key principles of privacy-by-design, that Aarogya Setu claims to adhere to, is data minimisation. Any king of content aggregation and personalisation requires more data collection about usage habits, not less. Building block for India Health Stack: "What we may have stumbled upon is the initial building block for India Health Stack so everything else apart form COVID-19 which could be linked to telemedicine, tele-consultation, etc., if people are interested, can…
