The ongoing tussle between Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress party over allegations of unauthorized data leakage took a step further yesterday when the latter stalled its official app from being downloaded after charges were made of it misusing data gathered from users.
Congress party’s social media team deactivated its official app ‘With INC’ from the Google Play Store to make it unavailable for downloading by Android phone users. This was done in response to a disclosure by a French cyber-security researcher, who said that a Congress website used for membership was based on an unsecured network and it was functioning from a server situated in Singapore.
BJP had used this information to allege that Congress was selling away data gathered from its followers and app users in India to a company based in Singapore. Their claim was made in response to Rahul Gandhi’s recent tweets, in which he had directly accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of being involved in selling data of Indian users.
Gandhi had said that information collected from Narendra Modi’s official app was being sent away to an American company. Yesterday, he even went to the extent of calling the Prime Minister a “Big Boss” who spies on Indians.
It is not only the Congress that has made changes to its official app following this face-off over data privacy. Even the BJP-owned Narendra Modi app was changed yesterday with newer policy measures to prevent concerns of data theft from cropping up again.