How Dharavi, Asia’s biggest slum, fought against COVID-19
Publisher
Global Views 360
Publication Date
July 22, 2020
URL
A still from Dharavi, Mumbai | Source: M M via Flickr
Imagine a place where 8-10 people live in 100 square feet structures. A place which squeezes close to 6,50,000 people, 5,000 small factories, and about 15,000 single-room workshops in just 2.5 square kilometer area. Welcome to Dharavi, the biggest slum of Asia situated in the heart of fashion, entertainment, and commercial capital of India, Mumbai.
When the first COVID-19 case was discovered in Dharavi, it caused massive panic among the citizens as well as officials. Social distancing is virtually impossible to achieve in Dharavi, which is a maze of narrow congested lanes with tenements on either side of it and where 80% of the population use community toilets.
With their fingers crossed, people were speculating about Dharavi turning into a graveyard. These fears turned out to be misplaced and three months later Dharavi won praise from the WHO for effectively restricting the spread of coronavirus. According to the official data, the COVID-19 case doubling rate improved greatly, from 18 days in April, to 43 days in May, to 108 days in June, and 480 days in July.
Mr. Kiran Dighavkar, Assistant Commissioner of the top civic body of Mumbai, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) said that their undertaking of an aggressive strategy of 4T’s - Tracing, Tracking, Testing & Treating, is the key to Dharavi’s successful fightback against the pandemic. The fightback plan was aptly coined "Mission Dharavi".
Extensive screening and testing of residents was done to detect the symptoms for coronavirus in "fever camp" which were set up by medical workers in different parts of the slum everyday. Many buildings such as schools, wedding halls, and sports complexes were overtaken by the civic authorities and were repurposed as quarantine facilities. A 200-bed hospital was also set up in record 14 days.
The BMC commissioner, I S Chahal said “Proactive screening helped in early detection, timely treatment and recovery.” Close to six hundred thousand people were screened, 14,000 people tested and 13,000 quarantined in nearby institutions, schools, marriage halls, and sports complexes. Furthermore, continuous monitoring of people’s movement using drones helped reinforce containment measures and scaled progress swiftly.
To further strengthen the measure, locals of the community emerged as “COVID Yodhas” (warriors) to address the concerns, a senior official said. Many well endowed citizens and NGO’s provided Free meals, ration, PPE gear, oxygen cylinders, gloves, masks, medicines, and ventilators to residents and doctors.th July
On 8th July 2020 Dharavi recorded a total of 2,335 COVID-19 out of which 1,735 patients have recovered and there are only 352 active cases at present. Only 82 deaths were recorded in Dharavi till 8th July as against more than 4500 in the whole of Mumbai.
This phenomenal success has given the world a yet simple and effective technique in curbing the spread of the deadly virus. World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in a virtual press conference in Geneva, acknowledging the efforts of various nations and Dharavi to contain the virus, said that “There are many examples from around the world that have shown that even if the outbreak is very intense, it can still be brought back under control”. Further, he added, “And some of these examples are Italy, Spain, and South Korea, and even in Dharavi -- a densely packed area in the megacity of Mumbai -- a strong focus on community engagement and the basics of testing, tracing, isolating and treating all those that are sick is key to breaking the chains of transmission and suppressing the virus.”
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WhatsApp's New Privacy Policy: Collecting Metadata and Its Implications
According to WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, the app is set to collect “only” user’s Metadata. Metadata can reveal a lot more than merely the app usage of a person. Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker stated, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content.”
This article explores the ways in which WhatsApp is underselling the true estimation of the significance of Metadata.
Facebook owned WhatsApp recently announced the update of its privacy policy terms. 8th of February, 2021 was initially set as the deadline for users to either accept the new privacy policy or delete their account. By this time, most of us have already witnessed or been a part of the backlash that WhatsApp is experiencing. LocalCircles conducted a survey and the results indicated that 15% of India’s users are likely to move away entirely from the app while 36% will drastically reduce the usage and 67% of users are likely to discontinue chats with WhatsApp business accounts.
To reinstall trust in its users, WhatsApp released a clarification stating that the new policy update doesn’t compromise privacy of messages with friends and family. Furthermore, it explains that the update includes changes related to WhatsApp business accounts are optional too.
However, owing to severe backlash, WhatsApp has pushed the deadline to May 15 while they further clarify their policy updates.
It is true that WhatsApp cannot read our messages as it is end-to-end encrypted which implies that only a message’s sender and receiver can read it. The updated privacy policy intends to alert users that some businesses would soon be using Facebook-servers to store messages with their customers. By accepting the new privacy policy, users will be allowing WhatsApp to reserve all rights to collect your data and share it with the expansive Facebook and Instagram networks ‘regardless of whether you have profiles on those apps.’
By using WhatsApp, you may now be sharing your usage data, your phone’s unique identifier, your location when the location service is enabled, among several other types of metadata. A culmination of all your metadata is linked to your identity.
The value of metadata has been underestimated since the term isn’t clearly understood. Metadata is data about our data. For instance, in a cell phone conversation, the conversation itself isn’t metadata but everything except that is metadata. Data regarding who you called, how long you spoke for, where you were when you placed the call, where the other person on the line was and the time you placed the call. Consider a situation when every time you made a call to someone, you had to inform a particular person about who you called, how long you spoke for, when and where and all other details except the content spoken. This applies for every single call and everyone else’s metadata is also being recorded. The person owning the metadata can analyze and tell a lot about your personal life. Who you work with, who you spend time with, who you are close to, where you are at particular times and so on…
Kurt Opsahl, in his post in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, gives an example of how companies and governments collect intimate details about your life with the disguised use of the word called metadata. The following examples are an excerpt of his article:
“They know you rang a phone sex service at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. They know that you called suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge.
They know you spoke with an HIV testing service, then your doctor, then your health insurance company in the same hour.
They know you called a gynaecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local Planned Parenthood's number later that day. But nobody knows what you spoke about.”
Metadata provides more than required context to know some of the most intimate and personal details of your lives. When this data is correlated with the records of other phone calls, one can easily obtain a lot more data and track our daily routines. This is merely about phone calls. WhatsApp includes a lot more features and will collect metadata of chats, businesses and money transactions.
In WhatsApp’s words:
“We collect service-related, diagnostic, and performance information. This includes information about your activity (such as how you use our Services, how you interact with others using our Services, and the like), log files, and diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports.”
In addition to this, WhatsApp also collects information about IP address, OS, browser information and phone number.
Stanford’s computer scientists conducted an analysis to understand the extent of intrusion of privacy using metadata. The scientists built an app for smartphones. The app was developed to retrieve metadata of calls and text messages from more than 800 volunteers’ phone logs. The researchers received records of more than 250,000 calls and 1.2 million texts. Their inexpensive analysis revealed personal details of several people like their health records. Researchers were also able to learn that one of their participants owned an AR semi-automatic rifle with only metadata.
Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency once stated that “the U.S. government kill[s] people based on metadata.”
In 2016, Facebook was involved in the infamous data privacy scandal which centered around collection of personal data of over 87 million people by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting and strategic analyst firm. The organization harvested user data for targeted advertising, particularly political advertising during the 2016 U.S. election. While the central offender was Cambridge Analytica, the apparent indifference for data privacy to Facebook facilitated Cambridge Analytical and several other organizations.
In June 2018, Facebook confirmed that it was sharing data with at least 4 Chinese companies, Huawei, Oppo, Lenovo and TCL. Facebook was under scrutiny from the U.S. intelligence agencies on security issues as they claimed that the data with the Chinese telecommunication companies would provide an opportunity for a foreign espionage.
In September 2019, there were reports that the Indian government contemplated making it mandatory for companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to share the public data of users.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) was planning on issuing new guidelines under the Information Technology Act which according to which tech giants would have been required to share freely available data or the public information that they collate in the course of their operations, including traffic, buying and illness patterns.
Europe is exempted from WhatsApp’s new privacy policy as EU antitrust authorities fined Facebook 110 million euros for misleading the regulators during the takeover of WhatsApp in 2014. EU’s strict privacy laws empowers regulators to fine up to 4% of global annual revenue of the companies that breach the bloc’s rules.
Your Metadata is extremely personal. By giving WhatsApp the authority to access it, you are giving access to several other organizations, businesses and it also makes you more vulnerable to third-party hackers and trackers. WhatsApp has given multiple assurances about its updated privacy policy being noninvasive. However, most of these assurances are cleverly worded and misleading statements. It is important to read through the fine print of the new policy before accepting it.
