Indian government app exposes children’s personal information

An app used by teachers and schools in India has been gathering sensitive personal information for over a year.

An app used by teachers and schools in India has been gathering sensitive personal information for over a year. The non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch reported that the Diksha app was gathering children’s names, schools, addresses, and email addresses and partially redacted phone numbers and email addresses.

The app is owned and used by India’s education ministry. The personal data belonging to almost 600,000 students and more than 1 million teachers was stored in unencrypted files.

The data covered the period from March 2020 to December 2022 – at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic – when many kids were forced to rely solely on Diksha for their education.