India Considers Enforcing A-GPS on Mobile Devices

India’s government is considering a proposal to force smartphone manufacturers to enable GPS tracking at all times.

The proposal comes courtesy of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), a non-governmental trade association representing Reliance's Jio and Bharti Airtel, some of the biggest Indian telecom companies.

The proposal is in response to the Modi administration’s frustrations that they often don’t get precise locations when making legal requests to telecom firms, since they rely on cellular tower triangulation which isn’t always very precise.

A-GPS, or assisted Global Positioning System, is a form of GPS that combines the satellite-based GPS with some other technology like the cellular network and nearby Wi-Fi access points to achieve a much more precise location than either technology could achieve alone. The proposal would see to it that smartphone users can't disable the technology. This would mean that location services would always have to be enabled without an option to turn them off.

Apple, Google, and Samsung all oppose the move on the grounds that "the A-GPS network service ... (is) not deployed or supported for location surveillance" and that the move would be "regulatory overreach," according to a letter from the India Cellular & Electronics Association (ICEA), a different non-governmental organization representing Apple and Google.

India's government had scheduled to meet with the top smartphone manufacturers to discuss the matter but the meeting was postponed for unknown reasons. At this point, no decision has been made yet.

This most recent government overreach comes just days after India had tried to force smartphone manufacturers to install a government app by default and prevent it from being removed by users. The app, called Sanchar Saathi, is billed as a "cybersecurity" app that will help recover lost phones. Sanchar Saathi is already available for users to voluntarily download from both Apple and Google's app stores.

Apple planned to outright refuse the order, and the Indian government quickly backed down and reversed the requirement.

This followed yet another attempt by the Indian government to encroach on users of end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, according to the Indian Express:

Last week, the DoT issued a directive to companies like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram, under which users will no longer be able to access the applications without the SIM card with which they registered for the services on their phones. The directive will also mean that the companion web services, such as WhatsApp Web, will not be available uninterrupted to users, as they will be automatically logged out every six hours.

The Indian government is on the warpath trying to chip away at the privacy rights of Indians. Luckily they've been unsuccessful in their latest bout but they will certainly try again. Resistance from major smartphone manufacturers clearly has a large influence on these proposed policies, so good on Apple, Google and Samsung for fighting against it and I hope they continue to do so in the future.