Kerala police's decision to collect call details record as part of Covid-19 contact tracing triggers row

A decision of Kerala police to collect call details record (CDR) of individuals as part of Covid-19 contact tracing and surveillance activities have triggered a row of infringement of privacy.

While Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan justified the move as a Covid-19 containment measure, cyber experts said that there was not much use of CDR in contact tracing.

State police chief Loknath Behera had issued a directive to the ADGP (Intelligence) and ADGP (headquarters) to take steps to ensure that service providers promptly give CDR to the police as part of the Covid-19 containment measures.

Justifying the move citing the requirement of stringent measures to contain Covid-19, the Chief Minister said that the CDR would be used only for contact tracing activities and would not be misused.

Cybercrime investigator Dhanya Menon told DH that only tower location of individuals could help police trace the route map of a Covid-19 infected person, but that would not be precise. CDR includes the contact history of individuals too, which obviously raises questions of infringement of privacy, she said.

Meanwhile, a police official said that the only objective of collecting CDR was to trace the tower locations as a person being tested positive may not be able to recollect the travel history of the previous one to two weeks. The tower location history for a period of time alone could not be retrieved and hence the CDR was being collected.