BJP, Cong fight over who leaked user data
Parties accuse each other of misusing subscribers’ info
NEW DELHI: The political battle between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) shifted to a new theatre on Monday — smart apps — with each side accusing the other over issues such as user consent, data control, server location, and third-party services.
Congress president Rahul Gandhi kept up his attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal app, alleging he was acting like the “Big Boss” who likes to “spy on Indians” and misusing his official position to build a “personal database”. In turn, the BJP accused Gandhi of “technological illiteracy”, and said the Congress party’s own app shared data with “ideological bedfellows”.
The controversy broke out on Sunday when Gandhi picked a news report quoting a French security researcher, who identifies himself on Twitter as Elliot Alderson (a character from the Netflix show Mr Robot), to allege the personal data of users of the Namo App was being sent to a third party domain. The BJP insisted that this was no breach, the data was used only for analytics, and not stored by third-party services.
But the privacy policy on the PM’S personal app was updated not long after Gandhi’s accusation. It had earlier read, “Your personal information and contact details shall remain confidential... the information shall not be provided to any third parties.”
The new policy states, “Certain information may be processed by third party services to offer you the most contextual content, show content in your language.”
On Monday morning, the debate took a turn, with the BJP making its own set of accusations against the Congress.
The BJP now picked up tweets from the same Elliot Alderson to allege that the server of the Congress app on Android was based in Singapore, and that membership data was not encrypted.
Soon after the allegation, the Congress removed its WITHINC app. The BJP’S national information and technology in-charge, Amit Malviya asked, “Rahul Gandhi gave a call to #Deletenamoapp but Congress deleted its own App from the Appstore after they were called out. What is the Congress hiding?”
His counterpart, the Congress’s social media and digital communications in-charge Divya Spandana, said they had not had any membership on the app for the past five months.
On the deletion of the app, she said: “The BJP and some journalists started circulating the f ake and defunct URL and misleading the people into believing that there was a breach of data, and we were giving out the information to our friends in Singapore. That is why we have to remove it.”