More bad news for mobile phone users in India after the compulsory SIM binding.The government is mandating a government app, Sanchar Saathi on every new phone, permanently. For the older devices it will be pushed to your phone via OTA. Users cannot delete it, this is a first. India has never before required an unremovable state app on phones. Sanchar Saathi is supposedly a lost phone tracker, but if it gets embedded with no possibility of removal, it becomes a government tracker on your device. If the government is allowed to get away with this, what’s next? Digiyatra forcibly installed on each device? An app that sends copies of your messages to the government once a month? The mobile phone is your personal space, and this is an invasion of your personal space. This is clearly a criminal invasion of our privacy. The government exempts itself from much of the Data Protection Law, this explains why. There was no public consultation. It was just forced on us, a legal way of embedding Pegasus like spyware on our devices. If we allow them to get away with this, more will follow.
