Always phone tracking of citizens

More surveillance from the Indian Government, with mandatory GPS / Location tracking ON for our handsets?
You won’t have the option of turning location off, and while Google, Apple and Samsung have opposed this, the Telecom Industry is pushing for it, Reuters reports.

Many of you have tagged me on this story, so let me explain what is going on here:

1. Impact it has on us: GPS on doesn’t mean we’re being tracked, but it does mean that we are all being forced to be minutely “trackable” all the time. The government may never want to track you, but this will drain your phone battery rapidly, and force you to charge it multiple times a day, and significantly reduce your phones battery life. It will also heat up your phone significantly. But the question that has to be asked: why is it that we need to make everyone trackable all the time, in order for one person to be tracked at one point in time?

This is disproportionate and badly thought through. Remember that Nitin Gadkari’s ministry MORTH is also planning to push GPS FASTAGs, instead of the RFID ones. They’ll make our cars more trackable.

Aadhaar is linked to mobile number is linked to SIM card is linked to to phone with GPS.
Aadhaar is linked to Driving License is linked to FASTAG (with GPS)

With this there’s no anonymity in the physical space.

We’ve already lost it for the most bit online. Now this too.

Also, GPS can give the government continuous location, not just when a tower handshake happens. Triangulation is episodic, and it updates when your phone pings the network. GPS updates every few seconds.

Trackable on foot. Trackable in the car. All of us. All the time. Like a report for our movements. A location graph!

2. Why is all this problematic?

The Centralised Monitoring System has GPS tracking ability (since 2010, I think. I reported on the Tender Document for Delhi Police), but it needs GPS to be on. Imagine how it impacts journalists meeting sources to report on the government. Imagine if two opposition party leaders are meeting planning to partner to form a coalition government after elections, or overthrow the sitting government in the state.

They’ve done nothing wrong, but they have something to hide. Whistleblowers, judges, lawyers…This isn’t good for democracy.

We also don't know how this will link up with NATGRID, the Indian governments ultimate surveillance system, which will take data from 21 public and private databases. Eventual plan is to expand it to over 1800 databases. More in the link in the next tweet in this thread.

3. No consent: same problem as Sanchar Saathi. The telcos want this forced on us. Users cant choose to NOT disclose their location, and hence this is a violation of privacy. Remember that India has no surveillance laws, and surveillance agencies are not accountable to Parliament.

The government has exempt itself from the Data Protection Law and now appears to be pushing for increasing surveillance, and making it perpetual. Of course, with the Supreme Court unwilling to look into matters of National Security (which is anything the government wants it to be, and is undefined), every act of surveillance can be justified under National Security.

Again, like with Sanchar Saathi and SIM Binding, there was no public consultation, no public disclosure. Same shit, different ministries. We’re supposed to be transparent and trackable all the time. Not the government.

4. The government has an alternative to GPS tracking: The government can track your location anyway, but not as well: Cellular towers can give a broader idea of where you might be by doing something called cell tower triangulation: they can estimate your location in a radius of 50-100 meters (maybe even better) because they’re comparing signals your phone receives from three different towers.

But it’s not as good GPS. You might remember that when you switched off GPS while using Maps, it used to switch from an exact location to a larger circle / range or a zone indicating where you could be. This is why.

Cell towers - 50-150 meters accuracy
GPS - 5 meters to even 1 meter accuracy

However Cell Tower tracking has been useful in the past. I’ve read SEBI reports on stock market manipulation by promoters, where it has historical data on peoples locations, like in a particular restaurant, validated by cell tower data.

We do this anyway, and triangulation appears good enough for SEBI to prove its case, why not other use cases? If triangulation is sufficient for criminal investigations, why do we need 24x7 GPS tracking of 1 billion devices?

5. GPS can help the government track you much much better: When we use Uber, Ola or Google Maps, it knows exactly where we are. Inside malls, it can even estimate which turn floor you are on. GPS tracking is very very precise, though not always accurate, because it uses satellite signals.

Your phone receives a ping from a satellite, and the time taken between when the satellite signal is sent and is received on your phone, along with cellular tower data, is used to calculate your exact location. Triangulation can’t recreate your path, your speed, the exact time you spent at an exact spot, or the difference between the entrance to an apartment complex and your front door. That’s why it’s the best way to track someone. You’ve seen Google Maps… This can create a perpetual history of where you’ve been all the time.

6. Every phone becomes an ACTIVE tracker.
It’s not just the government that will get the information from GPS — they’ll rarely use it. But every phone application can easily get access to your location because your location is perpetually on. Triangulation depends on telecom operators. Forced GPS forces your personal device to give up your location perpetually, and potentially to every app.

7. How SIM Binding changes things here: SIM Binding, which means that you social media/whatsapp account will be locked into the SIM essentially prevents people from running apps on secondary devices, or keep a clean device separate from their main identity, but use the same app. SIM Binding means you'll use the app on the same device and your movements will be mapped.

8. The game that the telecom lobby is playing: Here’s what is likely to have happened. The government must have told the telecom operators to improve location tracking. They’ve done it in the past. For this, telecom operators would have to invest in better hardware and improving the location sensitivity of cell towers. They don’t want to put in that money.

Airtel pushed back against the same thing in 2010 when the government asked it to upgrade systems to bring traceability down to 50 meters from 100 meters. What’s the easier counter - tell the government to screw the Internet companies and our handsets instead. Make the phone do the tracking. Shift the cost to the user. Burn their battery, not our capex. more