The Indian government is considering a controversial proposal from the country’s telecom industry that mandates Apple, Google and other companies to give regulators access to location data for all phones so they can use A-GPS on every device sold in India and doesn’t allow consumers to turn off their satellite-signal receiver. This is not just a technical upgrade, but an existential collision in which the state requires hyper-accurate surveillance tools and the world’s biggest technology companies are founded on a core principle of privacy.
This recommendation, initiated by the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) that represents most of the large carriers including Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, is motivated by requirement for accuracy in location up to meter levels as part of investigations. Today, law enforcement uses cell tower triangulation, which can be off by many meters. By marrying satellite signals with cellular data, A-GPS can lock a user’s position more accurately than satellites alone — essentially turning every smartphone into a constantly monitoring beacon. The resultant debate has set off a global privacy firestorm, dragging even the United Nations into the discussion where the opinion could serve as an international precedent for government surveillance.
Big Tech’s Resounding No: There Is Nothing Like This Globally
And the reaction of the world’s three largest smartphone makers — Apple, Google (whose stewardship of the Android ecosystem is at issue here) and Samsung — was just as stark and one-sided: An immediate and unequivocal “no” to the mandate. The companies, via their industry lobbying group, the India Cellular & Electronics Association (ICEA), have sent a strong warning to the Indian government:
Regulatory Overreach: In a letter submitted in confidence, the ICEA underscored that “no jurisdiction anywhere else in the world mandates such device-level, constant and non-consensual satellite tracking” and called it a serious case of “regulatory overreach. Technology experts concur, noting that A-GPS is usually switched on and off when an app asks for location or during emergency circumstances, not as a permanent mandatory background function.
Grave Privacy (and Security) Risks: The tech companies say forced, always-on tracking would have disastrous consequences on user privacy and place vulnerable populations at risk. In it, they warned that the most sensitive users—think journalists, judges, corporate executives and military officials — would effectively be tracked at all times from the moment they turned on their phones were this information hacked or misused.
The War on Transparency: Meanwhile, the telecom proposal is said to include a request to kill those annoying pop-up notifications we’ve been seeing all over the place showing what carrier or application is trying to access location data. These alerts, carriers say, “telegraph” targets of investigation. Apple and Google, for their part, argue that these notifications are a fundamental nonnegotiable thing they can provide to make sure we are asked about things happening on our phones. Anjum 2 days ago Ad Comments Off on Can we talk about how annoying this is Google says it’s gone: It will literally let you get things done without having to think about invisible tracking being attached.
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A Tender Moment in the Digital Rights Fight
This high-wire policy review is happening at a delicate time for digital rights in India. The Modi government had to recently revoked an order asking smartphone manufacturers to preinstall a state-backed cyber safety app following public and political criticism it could lead to snooping. The always-on GPS initiative is seen by activists and privacy advocates as a new bid to win the very surveillance powers that the earlier direction was unable to obtain.
Given that there are over 735 million smartphone users in India, the result of this debate matters. By adopting the telecom industry’s proposal, the government would turn India into a global outlier as one of the few democracies to power this type of mass surveillance for law enforcement in cooperation with telecommunications companies, which major tech companies have largely thwarted elsewhere. The sector is basically being requested to retool our foundation operating systems—iOS and Android—to break privacy on a global scale of their own standard, all for the Indian market, forcing big tech companies into an impossible decision between getting lucrative business there or respecting core privacy principles towards its users worldwide.
