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Thoughts based on my study: What’s happening with Covid-19 mobile apps in India now is the same kind of mess that happened with personal safety tech interventions 7 to 8 years ago, which eventually became impossible to unravel.
https://citizenmatters.in/tracking-quarantine-tracing-cases-sharing-info-can-these-govt-issued-apps-help-fight-covid-19-17151 (1)
https://citizenmatters.in/tracking-quarantine-tracing-cases-sharing-info-can-these-govt-issued-apps-help-fight-covid-19-17151 (1)
Govt bodies & private entities released a deluge of apps in response to public anger over rising crimes against women. Some apps were band-aid measures, some amateurish like a hobby project, some opportunistic, some self-promotional, & some (2)
meant to make a babu or cop feel good about themselves (the last part is anecdotal). Almost none underwent any audit, testing, consultation processes or RFPs and, as usual, no one cared to ask women if this was what we wanted (sigh). (3)
All that these tech inventions ended up doing was divert attention from the issue, which is rooted in social & cultural attitudes & norms. I wrote about it here: https://www.genderit.org/feminist-talk/womens-safety-there-app Study by @skchinmayi & me: https://thebachchaoproject.org/evaluating-safety-buttons-on-mobile-devices (4)
In most cases, it didn’t seem like any user-testing or field-testing was done before deployment. The process of app development itself was opaque and questionable. (5)
ToS & privacy policies either didn’t exist or were privacy-invading or just laughably bad. No app mentioned digital security testing or compliance. These apps also asked for a ridiculous number of unnecessary user permissions. (6)
Most govt apps were contracted to startups/ companies. With time, these apps fell into disuse or were abandoned by their creators. (7)
In the meanwhile, a lot of fanfare and public funds were spent on them. The overkill (in terms of the number of tech interventions) & underkill (in terms of their quality and unreliability) ended up eroding public trust in them. Fin. (8/n)
CC: @bachchaoproject
