Centre says users can delete state-owned web safety app, experts cite order to question claim

Union Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia on Tuesday claimed that users will be able to delete the government cyber security app that smartphone manufacturers have been asked to mandatorily preload on all devices.

However, the digital rights organisation Internet Freedom Foundation pointed out that Scindia’s explanation was incorrect.

Paragraph 7(b) of the order issued by the Department of Telecommunications on Friday states that the Sanchar Saathi app “cannot be ‘disabled or restricted’”, the organisation said on social media.

The Union government directed manufacturers to preinstall the app in new phones and to add the application to devices that have already been sold through a software update within three months.

Users will not be able to disable the app, the Ministry of Communications said in a press release on Monday.

The comment by Scindia on Tuesday came following pushback by Opposition leaders and technology policy experts who expressed concern that the directive amounted to expanded surveillance without safeguards.

The Congress said that the directive by the telecom department was “beyond unconstitutional” and demanded that it should be rolled back immediately.

Party leader KC Venugopal said that “Big Brother cannot watch us”, adding that the right to privacy is an intrinsic part of the fundamental right to life and liberty.

“A pre-loaded government app that cannot be uninstalled is a dystopian tool to monitor every Indian,” Venugopal said on social media. “It is a means to watch over every movement, interaction and decision of each citizen.”

The Congress MP said that the directive was part of a series of “relentless assaults” on constitutional rights.

Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Tuesday said that Sanchar Saathi was a “snooping app”.

“Everyone must have the right to privacy to send messages to family and friends without the government looking at everything,” Vadra told reporters. “They’re turning this country into a dictatorship in every form.”

She added: “There’s a very fine line between reporting fraud and seeing what every citizen of India is doing on their phone. That’s not how it should work.”

Vadra said that while there is a need for strengthened cybersecurity, it does not give the government an excuse to “go into every citizen’s telephone”.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) MP John Brittas told ANI that the directive was a “blatant invasion” into privacy.

The matter was also raised in Parliament on Tuesday.

During a discussion on a separate matter in Rajya Sabha, Congress MP Renuka Chowdhury said that there are “many ways in which the Modi government disrupts democracy” and the Sanchar Saathi app is “yet another instrument that diminishes the rights of citizens, just like the SIR [special intensive revision of electoral rolls]”.

Scindia told reporters outside Parliament that the app enables users to ensure their safety.

“When the Opposition has no issues, and they are trying to find some, we cannot help them,” he said. “Our duty is to help the consumers and ensure their safety.”

Bharatiya Janata Party publicity chief Amit Malviya said that the app will only work after user activation. It is a “cybersecurity safeguard, not a surveillance mechanism”, he said.

Not proportional, app could be repurposed: Digital rights group

The Internet Freedom Foundation on Tuesday said that the November 28 directive was a “deeply worrying expansion” of executive control over personal digital devices.

The means chosen to curb International Mobile Equipment Identity fraud are disproportionate, legally fragile and structurally hostile to user privacy and autonomy, it said.

The requirement for the functionalities of the app not being disabled converts every smartphone “into a vessel for state-mandated software that the user cannot meaningfully refuse, control or remove”.

The foundation said that for the app to work, it would “almost certainly need system level or root level access” to the device.

“That design choice erodes the protections that normally prevent one app from peering into the data of others, and turns Sanchar Saathi into a permanent, non-consensual point of access sitting inside the operating system of every Indian smartphone user,” it added.

The organisation argued that the mandatory installation of the app does not pass the proportionality test laid down by the 2017 KS Puttaswamy judgement, which established the right to privacy as a fundamental right. The test requires that any intrusion into the right to privacy must meet the standards of legality, necessity and proportionality.

It also said that the directive was so vague that it while today the app is framed as a benign IMEI checker, “through a server side update, it could be repurposed for client side scanning for ‘banned’ applications, flag VPN [Virtual Private Network] usage, correlate SIM activity, or trawl SMS logs in the name of fraud detection”.

The foundation said that the Union government was asking all smartphone users to accept an “open ended, updatable surveillance capability” on their personal devices “without the basic guardrails that a constitutional democracy should insist on as a matter of course”.

Technology policy expert Pranesh Prakash questioned the necessity of mandating the Sanchar Saathi app when the government already has the Central Equipment Identity Register to blacklist IMEI numbers.

“All telecom networks in India have EIRs [equipment identity registers] to check and block spoofed/null IMEIs and reported IMEIs (of stolen phones) with the Indian govt running a CEIR,” he said. “I still haven’t heard a good argument as to why having this app pre-installed at a device level is helpful.”

Technology company Apple does not plan to comply with New Delhi’s directive, Reuters quoted three unidentified persons in the industry as saying.

The United States-based firm will tell the Indian government that it does not follow such mandates anywhere in the world as they raise several privacy and security issues for the company’s iOS ecosystem, Reuters quoted two of the persons, who are familiar with Apple’s concerns, as saying.