Cong, BJP spar
“If as PM he wants to use tech to communicate with India, no problem. But use the official PMO APP for it. This data belongs to India, not Modi,” Gandhi added.
He had alleged on Sunday that the data of users who had installed the NaMo App on their mobile phones was shared with an American firm, a charge denied by the BJP immediately.
The Congress president referred to a media report in which a French vigilante hacker had, in a series of tweets, alleged that the personal data including email IDs, photos, gender and names of the users of Prime Minister’s mobile app were being sent to a third party domain without their consent.
The NaMo app allows users to receive messages and emails from PM Modi. It has been downloaded over five million times, according to industry estimates.
Several leaders as well the Karnataka unit of the BJP, which called Gandhi “technically challenged” and said he won’t understand “this kind of stuff”, led the party’s defence against Congress.
Information and broadcasting minister Irani hit back with a series of derisive tweets, saying that Gandhi came to know about the National Cadet Corp (NCC) only because of the NaMo app.
“RahulGandhi ji, even ‘Chhota Bheem’ knows that commonly asked permission on Apps don’t tantamount to snooping,” she said referring to the animated series for children.
“Now that we’re talking tech, would you care to answer @RahulGandhi ji why Congress sends data to Singapore Servers which can be accessed by any Tom, Dick and Analytica?” she asked.
Earlier, Malviya also accused the Congress party of giving “all your data to my friends in Singapore” on Twitter and attached screenshots of the Congress’ website privacy policy listings.
Malviya also alleged that the Congress, inspired by its leader Sonia Gandhi’s “all power no accountability”, will take all your data, even share it worldwide with organisations like Cambridge Analytica but will not take responsibility of it.
The opposition party said on its official Twitter handle that the ‘WithINC app’ has not been in use for over five months since it moved membership to http:// www.inc.in last November.
Gandhi’s counter-offensive against the Modi government comes days after the BJP accused the Congress of allegedly hiring the London-based Cambridge Analytica, which is in a global row for illegally harvesting personal data of users from Facebook to influence elections.