After the Siddaramaiah app, a State government-run application that functioned as a bridge between the Chief Minister and citizens, was pulled down, Siddaramaiah may find mentions of him and the Congress government’s “works” over the past few years being scrubbed from the government’s online presence.
Unlike before the 2013 Assembly elections, the State government has been active with its promotions in the build-up to the 2018 Assembly elections. While the Election Commission of India (ECI) has ordered the removal of all pictures of Mr. Siddaramaiah and other Congress Ministers from government websites, its orders may even extend to previous posts on social media that tout “achievements” of the government.
Currently, all posts before the model code of conduct for the Assembly elections came into force continue to exist — with pictures of projects undertaken, schemes initiated by the Congress government, and even personal remarks by Ministers being prominent.
“We have already got the Chief Minister’s photos removed from the government websites. On similar grounds, any data stored on government works or achievements should be removed from official online content,” said an ECI official. This would involve reviewing over 5,600 tweets on the Chief Minister’s official page or 10,000 tweets on the Karnataka Varthe page.
e-governance Department officials said a team would look at the content on the websites managed by them, and decide on what should be removed.
Among the first things to be pulled down is the Siddaramaiah app which is run by the Centre for e-governance with content generated by the Chief Minister’s office. “Suitable measures have been taken for compliance,” said an official handling content for the app. But, questions have risen over the expenditure for promotion of the short-lived app over the past few months, as well as data collection from over 1 lakh people who had downloaded it. Since its launch in October 31, 2017, the app was promoted on government websites, newspaper and television ads, billboards, and even on buses.
App data
Shreeharsha Perla, a software engineer from the city, said his analysis showed that data from the app was sent to private servers, much like the controversies surrounding the Narendra Modi app or the Indian National Congress app, in the wake of the reports that Facebook data had been leaked.
“It can be seen that the information was being sent to a private company who developed the app. Details of people who downloaded the app is being stored in a private database (run by a multinational software giant). This data can be misused during canvassing,” he said.
However, Kumar Piyush, founder of Infopine which developed the app, said all the data was stored in the State data centre. “It was only during the test run that data was hosted in private servers. After the app was approved, all the data is with the State government itself,” he said, and added that app can continue — albeit with a different name — even if a new Chief Minister is elected in the coming months.
Similarly, the official handling the app dismissed the allegation.
The Congress, meanwhile, has distanced itself from the app, saying it was run entirely by government agencies and they had no role in the functioning of the application.
