New Delhi, 23rd May 2021
Lately there has been a good amount of press on how some techies and programmers have been able to defy the system and book appointment slots using specialised scripts. As the government announced vaccine booking on cowin.org portal, some specialized websites, like notifymyvaccine.com and under45.in surfaced almost immediately after the government announced that vaccination will be open for 18+, even giants like PayTM came up withย specialised portal for vaccine notification. Today we will find out if these scripts raise a legal concern, if yes, then what can be done by us, the common man, to get vaccinated?
To answer this question, we turned to one of the lawyer who operate in angel investment space, Shaheena Attarwala. Speaking exclusively with GlobalToday, Shaheena expressed her concerns over the scripts, โLately Iโve seen multiple type of scripts operating in this space, some of them notify you immediately after vaccine is available in your district, and some of them even goes beyond mere notifications and book the slot for you, inspecting closely, it is the later that is the cause of trouble.โ
โCowinโs data sharing policies allow people to create public apps that access public data, they have made the APIs public themselves. If you look at https://apisetu.gov.in/public/marketplace/api/cowin โ these APIs are for public consumptionโ, she added.
Global today independently verified the source and found that there are protected APIs as well, that is specifically for booking the appointment.
Shaheena further added, โPeople can create applications that read public data and create data aggregation models or notifications if the data changes on top of it, without any legal questions, the problem comes in when they access cowin site and do the booking as well in completely automated fashion. In software terms, this is called โ Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF)โ.
Then the question remains, are there applications that are doing that as well?
We turned back to Shaheena for the answer, and she quoted, โWell there are scripts, but for private consumption only, Iโve seen some friends using one of such open source appointment booking scripts from github, but I have not so far come across any public platform. If any, it must be reported to the government, as this creates inequality in the system for few skilled ones.โ
So then what should we do as ordinary citizens who are not very tech savvy to get the appointments? Well, at the moment, it looks like the bigger problem with vaccines is supply rather than the demand per se. Once the supply will improvise, there will be more slots than required, and then people wonโt really have to use notification tools to beat the queue. Till then, live the IRCTC life and sign up on one of these sites to not be left out and be patient for the supplies to improvise, till then stay home and stay safe, and do report any site which does the automated appointment bookings.
