KOCHI: The Kerala government on Thursday filed a statement before the Kerala High Court that the allegation of opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala that there will be unauthorized access by the third party in the CDRs (Call Data Records) of COVID patients collecting by the police was without any basis.
The statement filed by the government follows the High Court order on Wednesday on a petition filed by the opposition leader challenging the decision of the state police chief to collect the CDRs of COVID-19 patients.
In the statement, Senior Government Pleader Suman Chakravarthy submitted that the state has been using the tower location details of COVID-19 patients for contact tracing, which is highly essential in arresting the spread of the pandemic and quarantining people who had first hand/primary contact with those affected.
The contention that there is an infraction of fundamental rights guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution of India is incorrect. Right to privacy, like all other fundamental rights, is not absolute and is subject to reasonable restrictions. In the current pandemic situation of a health emergency, it is rather necessary to balance the public right to life and health as against the right to privacy of individuals.
The contact tracing of an affected person can be best done using the tower location of his mobile phone. The tower dump details are not available in a segregated manner and are only available with the call detail records. The guidelines issued by the central government in this regard are strictly followed. However, the details provided by the cellular service providers are not in a segregated form.
On a specific enquiry made to cellular phone operators as to whether the details of tower location alone can be provided, it was stated that the CDR details are downloaded by them from the server in encrypted CSV (Comma Separated Value)format and they are not authorised to do any alterations to the same.
Any segregation has to be done by the agency which seeks the details, since the service providers are not authorised to alter the fields. The only other method of obtaining tower location is through LBS (location-based service) (real-time), by which the actual tower location of a person at a given time can be obtained. This cannot be used for getting the tower location of previous days.
Upon receipt of CDR details from the service provider, which contain 13 columns, the 7th column which contains the First Cell Global ID alone is decoded by the police with the data provided by the cellular service provider to obtain the latitude and longitude. Since CDRs are the only method of obtaining the previous fourteen days' tower location of COVID-19 patients, the mentioning of CDRs in the order cannot be found fault with.
The CDRs are kept strictly confidential and used for the limited purpose of identifying the tower location. Once the places where the COVID-19 patients visited have been identified, the CDRs are immediately destroyed. The CDRs obtained are stored by the police and not by any third party or ‘unknown agency’as stated in the writ petition. All possible measures are taken by the police to ensure that the CDRs are not accessed by any third party. The allegation that there was an indiscriminate collection of CDRs of COVID-19 patients was false, submitted the state government.