It’s been just a week since the Indian government pulled a U-ey on new regulations that would have required Apple and other smartphone makers to pre-load a government-run tracking app on every smartphone sold in the region and to make it undeletable. Now, government officials are picking another battle over tracking Indian users.
India is considering regulations that would require smartphone makers to keep GPS location services permanently enabled on every handset sold in the country, reports Reuters.
Apple and other companies would be required to keep GPS enabled 24/7, and users would have no way of disabling the feature. The proposal would require “smartphone makers to activate A-GPS technology – which uses satellite signals and cellular data (…) precise enough that a user can be tracked to within about a meter.”
Usually, GPS isn’t activated unless an app requests location data or when an emergency call is placed.
The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) says the feature needs to be enabled, as it claims that location data from cell tower triangulation is not sufficient for use by investigators and says that authorities should have access to the meter-level coordinates provided by GPS.
The government could also force smartphone makers to disable pop-up notifications informing users when a carrier attempts to access location information.
As you might imagine, Apple and other companies are once again pushing back on this new privacy violation. Industry organization India Cellular & Electronics Association (ICEA) in July sent a letter to the government warning them that forcing GPS to be enabled at all times would be a serious case of regulatory overreach.
A meeting between India’s home ministry and smartphone executives had been set for Friday, but it was postponed at the last minute.
Reuters says that it sent inquiries for comment from all involved parties – including Apple, Samsung, Google, India’s IT and home ministries, and others, although none have yet to respond. Requests to lobbying groups ICEA and COAI also went unanswered.
Last week, we reported that India was going to direct smartphone makers to pre-install a government-ran tracking app, “Sanchar Saathi,” that would be unremovable by users. The companies would have also been required to install the snooping app on previously sold devices, via a forced software update.
However, Indian officials eventually backed down on making the app unremovable, then pulled back completely by abandoning the idea of having it installed before a handset left the factory. The app is available in the Indian App Store for voluntary installation.
