'Illegal expansion of Kerala police's power'

Digital rights experts have raised serious concerns over Kerala’s decision to access call records of coronavirus patients for contact tracing, saying that the move has led to “illegal expansion of police powers” and urged that measures should be taken to harmonise the right to privacy with the right to public health, reports Anam Ajmal.
“CDR checks are primarily location checks since they reveal tower location of calls, but they also leave behind a huge trail of data.This is similar to Aarogya Setu’s data collection method, but with visible police power and minus private sector access,” activist Anivar Aravind told TOI.
According to activist Anivar Aravind, the biggest concern with the initiative is that the state has sanctioned the project, which has led to “illegal expansion of police powers”.
However, sources in a central agency pointed out that the sourcing of CDRs is different from interception as only details of calls made/received are sought, without tapping the contents of the conversations. Police are empowered under Section 91 of the CrPC as well as Section 5(2) of the Indian Telegraph Act to summon CDRs for the purposes of investigation.
CM Pinarayi Vijayan had announced that the state government was using the CDR of Covid patients to chart out a “route map” to trace who they came in contact with. But, according to experts, this is not an accurate way to trace contacts. “When using CDRs to trace contacts based on GPS or cell tower location, at a busy intersection all individuals may be listed as contacts, which is not the case,” said Kazim Rizvi, founder of tech-policy thinktank The Dialogue.
According to Kazim, there can be less intrusive ways of dealing with the pandemic. “The 2017 right to privacy judgment lays down a three-part test for any action that could potentially violate one’s fundamental right to privacy. It needs to be towards a legitimate purpose and proportional to the ends it seeks to address... In the absence of a data protection law and a surveillance framework, this (kind of data collection) promotes distrust in the government. Measures should be taken to harmonise the right to privacy with the right to public health,” said Rizvi, while asserting that police accessing CDRs is “detrimental to individual privacy”.