The Union government on Wednesday said it waswithdrawing its order that directed smartphone manufacturers to mandatorily preload a government cybersecurity app on all devices, following pushback.
“Given Sanchar Saathi’s increasing acceptance, [the] government has decided not to make the pre- installation mandatory for mobile manufacturers,” said the Ministry of Communications.
The Union government had, on November 28, 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 had 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, Union Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia 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.
After the announcement on Wednesday, the organisation described the decision as a “welcome step” but stated it was “awaiting the full text of the legal order that should accompany this announcement, including any revised directions”.
“For now, we should treat this as cautious optimism, not closure, until the formal legal direction is published and independently confirmed,” said the Internet Freedom Foundation.
The announcement came hours after Scindia told Parliament that the appcannot be used for snooping.
“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.
Scindia had also 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.
On Wednesday, the ministry reiterated that the government had mandated the use of the app “with an intent to provide access to cybersecurity to all citizens”.
“There is no other function other than protecting the users in the app and they can remove the app whenever they want,” the ministry said in a press release. “This has been clarified by [the] government.”
The Congress had on Monday said that the directive by the telecom department was “beyond unconstitutional” and demanded that it should be rolled back immediately.
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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