India was always a surveillance state in the making, thanks to Aadhaar.

The Indian government is now utilizing the crisis to fast-pace the process. Not only are they planning to make the contact tracing app registration on new phones mandatory, they're also planning to bring the app to feature phones.

Source: Aarogya Setu coming on feature phones; to cover the entire country https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/aarogya-s...

Interesting, thanks. "Never let a good crisis go to waste."

Has Aadhaar been used for surveilling people?

Yes, and even for knocking people off of voter lists in Andhra Pradesh.

Buffer stock gets wasted every year or mysteriously stolen. They stock more than they need to for some odd reasons again (oh yeah, they need to have something to sell in the black market).

7k+ people die every day due to hunger in india. If government cared when they could easily solve this. (3k are kids).

So I don't think it's about people.

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1% of India’s population is 13.4 million people.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%25%20of%20India%20pop...

That is 1913 days of deaths by starvation at the rate you specify.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%25%20of%20India%20pop...

Five and a quarter years.

How many people are dead due to covid so far?

I am making a bad faith argument but that doesn't mean proposing the 1% of entire country will die due to not having a privacy invasive contact tracing app.

1% is the approximate fatality rate with treatment.

1% is the “good” (less bad) outcome if everyone catches it in a controlled rate before vaccinations are ready.

You only get less than that with a lockdown of some sort. You get way more than that if the medical system can’t keep up with demand.

What’s the medical system like in India these days?

The problem with this though is all the data I look seems to be such a huge % of deaths of people over 75-80.

That demographic is going to die soon from something. There is a level of irrationality with all this in pretending that we are dramatically extending the lives of 80yos.

I remember the first death in NYC, Cuomo said they were over 70 and would have died from the flu also because they were in poor health. We have completely lost that level of rationality.

A huge % of the people we are "saving" are going to die in the next year from something else.

When I have tried to express this thought to people I have mostly got a sarcastic "yea fuck grandma, let her die" response that is completely irrational.

I don't think you can compare Coronavirus with the Flu. The effects are totally different. Especially from what I have read about from survivors. It is fucking scary to say the least. A British lady (age 39) has described the virus as like having "glass in your lungs" [1]. You don't get that with common Flu. This virus is killing even the younger generation. So I don't think we can call the fear "irrational".

[1]: https://nypost.com/2020/03/20/like-having-glass-in-your-lung...

This is why the discussion should focus on impact to average life expectancy, not raw fatality numbers.

> Can you show me that contact tracing can make significant difference?

It’s a standard technique that has been successfully used for a long time. For example, it’s how smallpox was finally wiped out.

(This is a separate point to “does this particular app look suspicious?” to which I say “yes”).

> going by government figures (which I doubt somewhat), only under 1k people have died so far.

In India, which is doing the things you’re complaining about.

Meanwhile, the USA, which has less than a quarter of India’s population, has 65,605.

Are you familiar with exponential growth, or do you only ever see the word “exponential” used to mean “rapid” without the strict mathematical meaning?

> Without the setu app being mandatory, going by government figures (which I doubt somewhat), only about 1.2k people have died so far.

That's probably because we are in a strict lockdown which is not sustainable. The real effect of contract-tracing will be only be known when the economy is fully opened.

I'm not sure I understand -- you seem to think I'm making a "bad faith argument", rather I see it as an observation. China has gone for 2) (not that they weren't a police state already), Sweden for 3), the rest of Europe seems to be inching towards 2). Do you have a different view? (genuinely interested).

No need to worry about me getting scam calls, I don't have a phone.

Taking a second look, I will apologise. I was biased in how I perceived it.

Every indian thread makes me paranoid because I feel there is an IT mob hired or some invisible force trying to get it off the front-page or reverse the criticism. It's always the same names making rebuttal to comments, same downvote waves, and they try to put more comments than the upvotes to automatically kill the submission.

Are these the only choices, or are there more? I haven't seen any medical leader or government leader present these as the only choices.

Parent comment is generalizing. “Being in lockdown” is “jailing citizens”. Contact tracing is “surveillance state” etc

where is the 1% coming from?

The 1% seems to be the death rate for the infected when there is healthcare available (i.e., not overloaded).

I'm not a member of a cult, but I would much rather have a 1% chance of dying than spend my life in a police-state. That's my personal preference (and yes, I am an old fart, so I have skin in this game).