"Extraordinary situations call for extraordinary measures," Justice Anu Sivaraman of the Kerala High Court said at least thrice during a five-minute Zoom hearing on a petition against making Aarogya Setu mandatory for all employees earlier today. She instructed advocate Jaishankar V. Nair, who appeared on behalf of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, to file a statement that says that "this app and the data collected will not be used for any other purpose". The matter is now listed for May 18. 'Best app in the world to fight COVID-19': MEITY Lawyer "We have already developed an app which is regarded as the best app in the world at the moment for fighting COVID. I have inputs saying that 130 hotspots were identified using this app. Now 10 crore people have downloaded it. We are expecting lakhs and lakhs of people to download it everyday. Unless everybody downloads this [it won't work]. I can explain, because if I am sitting in High Court, I can find out how many people are keeping unwell, who have registered on this app, using Bluetooth and other technical aspects of this app," Nair argued. Please note that during a press briefing yesterday, MEITY Secretary Ajay Prakash Sawhney said that 697 potential hotspots had been identified using location data from Aarogya Setu. Nair further said that a protocol was released yesterday "that said that the data will be anonymised" as per "hard anonymisation standards". He was referring to the Aarogya Setu Data Access and…
