The Government of India (GOI) was in the limelight recently due to its controversial decision to preload the Sanchar Saathi app on every smartphone in the country. Although the decision was rolled back, it did manage to create a stir. Now, it looks like the GOI is back in the spotlight again with its alleged phone location tracking mandate.
India weighs mandatory 'always-on' phone tracking
A new report from Reuters states that the India Government is reviewing a new telecom proposal which will force smartphone makers to have mandatory satellite location tracking enabled on their smartphones. This will essentially mean that new phones sold in the country will act as dedicated surveillance devices. Users will not even have the option to turn it off.
Now, while this proposal has not been settled on by the IT or home ministries, it has already started receiving resistance from Apple, Google and Samsung. The top smartphone makers have called this move out, citing "legal, privacy, and national security concerns." Even the India Cellular & Electronics Association (ICEA) lobbying group has called this directive "a regulatory overreach."
If this new directive comes into action, the Indian Government will have the power to use A-GPS technology to pinpoint the location of anyone, anytime they want. According to technology experts, with A-GPS always on, every move of every citizen of India will be easy to monitor and it will allow the government the ability to track movements as precisely as about a meter.
Moreover, Cooper Quintin, a security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that this is the first time a country has asked for an extreme measure of surveillance. An order like this doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.
This comes after the Government tried to mandate a cyber-safety app on every phone with the Sanchar Sathi app controversy. It immediately raised severe privacy and security concerns and the Telecom Ministry was forced to remove the directive altogether.
Now, with this new mandate, the scale of human rights, privacy, safety and security questions are higher than before. Reuters has mentioned that neither India's IT and home ministries nor the top companies in question like Apple, Samsung, Google, Reliance and Airtel have made any comment regarding the matter.
