Your valuable personal data on Aarogya Setu app can now be deleted completely. The CoVID-19 contact tracing, syndromic mapping and self-assessment app from India government have been updated with an option for its users to delete their account permanently. In addition, you could also erase all data of you stored by the app.
In the early stage of Aarogya Setu app rollout, there was lots of question raised against data security and privacy. Subsequently, the app was open sourced and the team behind the app released lots of updates to resolve these concerns.
The new “Delete My Account” option in the Aarogya Setu app allows you to completely and permanently delete your account and personal data from the service. The option will do two things, it will delete your account and then erase all your app data from your phone.
How to delete account from Aarogya Setu app?
- Head to the Aarogya Setu app settings and select “Delete My Account” option. For iOS users, it would be “Delete Account File” or “delete_account_title”.
- You would see all the warnings of what happens when you delete an account. This includes
- Permanently cancel your Aarogya Setu registration.
- Erase your app data from your phone.
- Erase your information from government servers.
- There enter your registered mobile number to proceed.
- Once OTP validated, the service would permanently delete your account in Aarogya Setu service. It would also delete all your collected personal data.
Do note that, even though you would be able to delete your account from Aarogya Setu, your data would be available in a government server for 30 days. Also, deleting the app before deleting your account will delete the app data from your phone, but your account data would remain in the government servers. So, make sure you first delete your account from Aarogya Setu app using the steps above and then delete the app from your phone.
There has been an additional update in Aarogya Setu app where you could give permission to any external apps to access your health data. Currently, this feature is limited to the iOS/Apple version of the app. You could enable this option by tapping settings in the app and then enabling “Approval for Aarogya Setu Status”. Once enabled you would see all third-party apps that have permission to access to your health status.