Government issues guidelines on use of CoWIN APIs by third-parties 2 hours ago The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) on Monday issued guidelines for the use of CoWIN Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) by third-party Application Service Providers (ASPs). Earlier in April, the government had stated that it does not want to open CoWIN APIs because they deal with sensitive data and a comprehensive data capture policy needs to be put in place before allowing third-party apps and services. But the government reversed its stance and opened up selective APIs anyway. As a result of this, a slew of apps and websites that offer vaccine alert services sprung up to address the limitations of the official CoWIN portal. These services captured mobile numbers and email IDs of users to notify them when a slot opens up in their desired area. But without a data capture policy in place, it was difficult to determine how these services used this data.