MediaNama is launching a new analysis newsletter – Reasoned by Nikhil Pahwa. Reasoned will feature analysis and forecasting related to technology policy, business and AI in India, going beyond the news, highlighting facts you probably didn’t know about, and connecting the dots. I’ll be writing max 2-3 times a week, and one update a week will appear on MediaNama.
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The article below is the first installment and is a follow-up to the post I made about India considering making GPS mandatorily on on handsets.
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First the tldr version of what’s going on, and then lets get to why this is happening and what to watch for next:
- The government is considering mandating always-on GPS on all phones after the telecom operators lobbied for this.
- This removes user choice and enables continuous, high-precision, perpetual tracking, and makes our devices susceptible to sharper, broader surveillance including mapping our movements.
- India already has good enough location tracking via cell tower triangulation, and monitoring of citizens using the Centralised Monitoring System which is embedded in telecom operator networks.
- Telcos don’t want to upgrade infrastructure to make locating a person even sharper than 50-150 meters, so they prefer shifting the traceability burden to the handset. Classic deflection from them. They’ve done this before.
- Combined with SIM Binding and GPS FASTags (currently on hold), this creates a unified, identity-linked movement graph for every citizen.
An always-on GPS isn’t a feature upgrade – it’s the creation of a citizen movement map/graph in a country with no surveillance law.
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Now here are some things for you to think about:
1. Where is India going with surveillance? NATGRID and the digital activity and movement map.
If GPS is always on, always tracking, it maps your movements and whom you meet. The original problem that Aadhaar solved was that Ram Singh in one database is different from Ram Singh in another, and so the government couldn’t get a 360 degree view of an individual they wanted to track. Identification existed in silos, and Aadhaar is gradually breaking them, even if new ID’s carry new names for the sake of optics. Apaar ID and UHIDs are an example. They’re named so as to not remind us that Aadhaar is everywhere. Our driving licenses are mandatorily linked to Aadhaar, as is our PAN. Our licenses are also linked to our FASTAG.
While Aadhaar is creating a Digital Activity Map, FASTAG and GPS will create a Movement Map.
Cell tower tracking shows where you might have been. Mandatory GPS shows where you were, when you were there, how fast you moved, what route you took, which side of the road you were on, which floor of a building you were likely on, how long you stayed, and who you…
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