The Cyberabad police on Saturday registered a case against IT Grids (India) Private Limited located at Madhapur for allegedly obtaining data of Andhra Pradesh voters in a fraudulent manner and misusing it.
A case of criminal conspiracy, cheating, theft IT Act was registered.
The case was registered following a complaint made by one Thummala Lokeswara Reddy who alleged that the company which developed a mobile application “Sevamitra” used by the Telugu Desam Party to interact with voters, had fraudulently obtained the data of AP voters and misused it.
Lokeswara Reddy said in the complaint that while he was studying electioneering in AP, he found that the Telugu Desam cadres were using mobile phone and tab-based software applications, especially the Sevamitra app, for advancing the party’s electoral prospects.
He said the TD website, www.telugudesam.org, and its Facebook page had details of Seva-mitra app which was meant for the TD’s registered members to gather information about voters and to work for the party’s victory.
“From what I learnt through Sevamitra app, the government of AP has utilised the services of Bluefrog Mobile Technologies in Visakhapatnam to implement government schemes and functions of AP. During the course of discharge of work by Bluefrog, it was given access to enormous amount of official data in respect of the beneficiaries of various government schemes and also private data of individuals,” Lokeshwar Reddy said.
He said the details of beneficiaries which include their demographic, geographic and other identification features such as name, age, gender, address, Aadhaar number were shared with the app. Also shared was data from, AP Smart Pulse Survey, State Resident Data Hub, Praja Sadhikara Vedika (managed by Karvy Data Management Services Ltd., Hyd) and IVRS surveys conducted by the AP government, he alleged.
He alleged that the IT Grids had acquired the data in violation of the Supreme Court guidelines.
“The TD is making use of this data to analyse who are for and who are against the government and based on this analysis they have deleted hundreds and thousands of names of voters,” Reddy said.
