The government cyber security app that smartphone manufacturers have been asked to mandatorily preload on all devices cannot be used for snooping, said Union Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia on Wednesday.
“Snooping is neither possible nor will it happen through this [Sanchar Saathi] app,” Scindia told Parliament, adding that the platform is meant to protect users against cyber frauds.
The Union government on Friday directed manufacturers to preinstall the Sanchar Saathi 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.
After Opposition leaders and technology policy experts expressed concern that the directive amounted to expanded surveillance without safeguards, Scindia had claimed on Tuesday that users would be able to delete the app.
However, the digital rights organisation Internet Freedom Foundation said that Scindia’s explanation was incorrect.
Paragraph 7(b) of the order issued by the Department of Telecommunications states that the Sanchar Saathi app “cannot be ‘disabled or restricted’”, the organisation said on social media.
On Wednesday, Scindia said that the government is willing to make changes to the order based on public feedback. He added that the government wants to give users the power to help them protect themselves.
During the Question Hour in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, the Congress questioned the minister’s assurance.
“Even after the app is disabled, users will not be able to know whether all its features have been disabled or not,” party MP Deepender Hooda said, asking the minister to clarify. “In such a situation, this issue is surrounded by concerns of violation of the right to privacy and suspicions of spying.”
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 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”, said the organisation.
It added that the directive was so vague that while today the app is framed as a benign International Mobile Equipment Identity 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”.
Also read: ‘A permanent surveillance backdoor’: Why Sanchar Saathi app order raises privacy fears
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