HYDERABAD: The Election Commission’s cVigil App — a channel to transmit and track complaints on violations of Model Code of Conduct, continues to have a GPS (global positioning system) problem. Earlier, during the Assembly elections in the State, the ECI had noted that there were errors pertaining to the accuracy in the application’s positioning system.
Firstly, to file a complaint using CVigil, one can take a picture or a video from within the application and then click on the ‘submit’ link. Officials from ECI, who receive them, follow them up based on GPS data which is embedded in the photos or videos.
However, on Saturday, when Express tried to access the ‘Photo’ option — from where snaps of apparent poll violations are to be taken — the application threw up an error message saying : “Something went wrong while capturing GPS location!” The same message was shown when Express tried to access the ‘Video’.
The problem lay with capturing the GPS location of one’s device. For rectifying that, one needs to switch on the ‘high accuracy’ mode in their phones.
“This will use more battery but will utilise all available methods to give the most accurate location possible. cVigil automatically tries to use the high accuracy mode but it might fail,” Chief Information Security Officer with the ECI Kushal Pathak, said in a release.
Apart from that, since the GPS is inherently prone to errors, the ECI recommended to find out if the issues were hardware or software related. For determining that, it urged users to download the GPS Essentials applications from Google Play, which would help in identifying the same.
Further, it also asked users to install an external compass in their smartphones (if it does not already come pre-installed), and in the worst scenario, if one’s phone does not support GPS anymore, to buy an external receiver.