Data breach on Covid 19 suspects details: Govt rolls back

Thiruvananthapuram: Stung by the onslaught of the Congress-led opposition over the handing over of data of Covid-19 suspects to US-based PR and marketing firm Sprinklr, the Kerala government has rolled back its decision to uplpoad the data on persons under Covid 19 surveillance on the website. This is after Opposistion Leader Ramesh Chennithala’s allegation that the government entered into a data-handling contract with Sprinklr without due procedures.

The government had directed local self-government bodies to update the data on the company’s website. However, there wasn’t an official announcement on the purpose of this data collection. On Monday, the government directed the LSG secretaries to suspend the updating the data on the website and instead do it on the government website, housevisit.kerala.gov.in

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Monday declined to answer any questions on the issue.

"The IT Secretary will be giving the details on it. I don't have time to waste on this," Vijayan told the media after chairing the daily review meeting on Covid-19 measures.

Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala had first raised this issue on Saturday and then Vijayan said the company belongs to a Keralaite and he came forward with the offer to help and the state government is not paying anything to this company, while even the WHO is using this data.

Since then, Chennithala has been coming out against this data trade off and joining him in this have been former Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, state Congress chief Mullapally Ramachandran and several Congress and UDF leaders, who have all pointed out that this was a "deal" and they wanted Vijayan to come clean on it.

The Congress had pointed out that IT Secretary M.Sivasankar has even appeared in the video put out by the US-based firm.