Modi ‘spied on voters through their phones

It has been claimed Narendra Modi’s smartphone app sends users’ personal data to a third party website without consent.

German President Frank Walter Steinmeier is welcomed to New Delhi by Narendra Modi on Saturday. Picture: AP

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been engulfed in a row over claims his official smartphone app sends users’ personal data to a third-party website without consent.

There were allegations last week the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the opposition Congress had hired an Indian subsidiary of Cambridge Analytica to help to swing local elections.

Now a security researcher who exposed flaws in India’s database for national identity cards has turned his attention to Mr Modi’s personal app, which allows supporters to send him messages, claiming at the weekend that user data had been passed to a third-party website in the US.

The Modi app was launched in 2015 and has been downloaded more than five million times. The BJP’s social media outreach is credited as a factor in its landslide victory in 2014. Mr Modi has the second-largest Twitter following of any serving world leader, after Donald Trump.

The BJP denied the claims by the French researcher, who tweets under the pseudonym Elliot Alderson, that the Modi app harvests personal details, including names, gender, photographs and email addresses. The party said that data was used only to offer the “most contextual content” and enable “a unique, personalised experience”.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi alleged that the app spied on users, recording “audio, video, contacts of your friends and family and it even tracks your ­location via GPS”.

The government denied his claim and said the Congress party’s own app passed data to a third party in Singapore. That app was withdrawn on Monday.

Last week it was reported that 1.5 million students at India’s military cadet corps were asked to download the app.

The BJP and Congress deny recruiting an Indian affiliate of Cambridge Analytica to assist their strategy for the general election next year. Ovleno Business Intelligence’s website listed both parties as clients before it was taken down last week, and the company’s chief executive worked on the Trump campaign.

The Times