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‘Tool to monitor Indians’: Opposition, experts on order mandating use of state-owned web safety app
Opposition leaders and technology policy experts on Tuesday expressed concern that the Union government's directive to smartphone manufacturers to mandatorily preload all new devices with a government cyber security app amounted to expanded surveillance without adequate safeguards.
The order was passed by the Department of Telecommunications on Friday.
It directed manufacturers to preload the Sanchar Saathi app in new phones and to add the application to devices that have already been sold through a software update. Users will not be able to disable the app, according to the Ministry of Communications.
However, amid the pushback, Union Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia told ANI on Tuesday that users will be able to delete the app.
The electronics manufacturers were asked to comply with the order within three months.
The Congress said that the directive by the telecom department was “beyond unconstitutional” and demanded that it should be rolled back immediately.
Party leader KC Venugopal said that “Big Brother cannot watch us”, adding that the right to privacy is an intrinsic part of the fundamental right to life and liberty.
“A pre-loaded government app that cannot be uninstalled is a dystopian tool to monitor every Indian,” Venugopal said on social media. “It is a means to watch over every movement, interaction and decision of each citizen.”
The Congress MP said that the directive was part of a series of “relentless assaults” on constitutional rights.
Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Tuesday said that Sanchar Saathi was a “snooping app”.
“Everyone must have the right to privacy to send messages to family and friends without the government looking at everything,” Vadra told reporters. “They're turning this country into a dictatorship in every form.”
She added: “There's a very fine line between reporting fraud and seeing what every citizen of India is doing on their phone. That's not how it should work.”
Vadra said that while there is a need for strengthened cybersecurity, it does not give the government an excuse to “go into every citizen's telephone”.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) MP John Brittas told ANI that the directive was a “blatant invasion” into privacy.
The matter was also raised in Parliament on Tuesday.
During a discussion on a separate matter in Rajya Sabha, Congress MP Renuka Chowdhury said that there are "many ways in which the Modi government disrupts democracy" and the Sanchar Saathi app is "yet another instrument that diminishes the rights of citizens, just like the SIR [special intensive revision of electoral rolls]".
Scindia told reporters outside Parliament that the app enables users to ensure their safety.
When the Opposition has no issues, and they are trying to find some, we cannot help them," he said. "Our duty is to help the consumers and ensure their safety.
The Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights organisation, on Tuesday said that the directive was a “deeply worrying expansion” of executive control over personal digital devices.
The means chosen to curb International Mobile Equipment Identity fraud are disproportionate, legally fragile and structurally hostile to user privacy and autonomy, it said.
The requirement for the functionalities of the app not being disabled converts every smartphone “into a vessel for state-mandated software that the user cannot meaningfully refuse, control or remove”.
The foundation said that for the app to work, it would “almost certainly need system level or root level access” to the device.
“That design choice erodes the protections that normally prevent one app from peering into the data of others, and turns Sanchar Saathi into a permanent, non-consensual point of access sitting inside the operating system of every Indian smartphone user,” it added.
The organisation argued that the mandatory installation of the app does not pass the proportionality test laid down by the 2017 KS Puttaswamy judgement, which established the right to privacy as a fundamental right. The test requires that any intrusion into the right to privacy must meet the standards of legality, necessity and proportionality.
It also said that the directive was so vague that it while today the app is framed as a benign IMEI checker, “through a server side update, it could be repurposed for client side scanning for ‘banned' applications, flag VPN usage, correlate SIM activity, or trawl SMS logs in the name of fraud detection”.
The foundation said that the Union government was asking all smartphone users to accept an “open ended, updatable surveillance capability” on their personal devices “without the basic guardrails that a constitutional democracy should insist on as a matter of course”.
Technology policy expert Pranesh Prakash questioned the necessity of mandating the Sanchar Saathi app when the government already Central Equipment Identity Register to centrally blacklist IMEI numbers.
“All telecom networks in India have EIRs [equipment identity registers] to check and block spoofed/null IMEIs and reported IMEIs (of stolen phones) with the Indian govt running a CEIR [Central Equipment Identity Register],” he said. “I still haven't heard a good argument as to why having this app pre-installed at a device level is helpful.”
Source: Scroll
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Ananya Panday reflected on her evolving career, stating she has only "touched the tip of the iceberg" and is entering a new phase of professional growth. New Delhi: Actress Ananya Panday recently spoke about her professional goals and outlook for the next two to three years
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