On May 29, Sarbjeet, an accredited social health activist (ASHA) in the northern Indian state of Haryana, was called to her local primary health center in the district of Kaithal for what she assumed was a regular monthly meeting. But at the meeting, her managers asked Sarbjeet and her fellow workers to install an app that tracked their every move.

Created by a private company, Advantal Technologies in Madhya Pradesh, the Shield 360 app is intended to monitor and update daily work targets for ASHA workers, but the app also tracks the movements of the ASHAs in real time via GPS and monitors their use of other apps and the internet. Shield 360 further allows health department officials to link the app with the computer systems in the government-run rural healthcare facilities and remotely add, delete or update any information or mobile applications on these work phones.

“We all installed it because at that time we did not know anything about the app,” recalls Sarbjeet, 40, a secretary with an ASHA workers union in Haryana which has 22,000 members. “My friend noticed that the location was automatically getting switched on and every detail of her movement was showing up,” says Sarbjeet. “It felt like giving the remote control of our phone in their hands.”

Sarbjeet, who asked not to use her second name, has been an ASHA for a decade. She was among 600 out of more than 900 female workers from Kaithal to have installed the app without being informed of its tracking capabilities. Some 11,000 ASHAs — or half of the workforce in Haryana — were also called to their local primary health centers for meetings in May and left with Shield 360 on their phones.