I abhor any decision that robs even a grain of my individual freedom.

I might be reading this wrong but these numbers seem very weird. Did more than half the people who downloaded the app block a stolen phone? And did each person who downloaded the app terminate 6 fraudulent connections?

It will be a garbage app that most likely will not work, considering the historical incompetence of the Indian government's expertise in all things tech.

I am pretty certain Apple and Samsung will pay off someone in the government.

I will point out that India have the highest number of victims of cyber-fraud. I personally know many people who have lost significant sums through social engineering attacks. The money is transferred to multiple mule accounts and physical cash is siphoned off to the fraudsters by the owners of those account. They choose helpless, illiterate, village dwelling account holders for this.

Another huge issue is unregulated loan apps. There are horror stories of people installing apps in order to take high-interest loans and then those apps stealing their private photos and contacts or accessing camera to take photos in private moments, and then sending those photos to contacts via WhatsApp when interest payment is overdue.

Then there are obvious security issues with terrorism and organized crime.

The government wants data. It's clear why. There is huge potential for misuse.

We need a world where this can be guaranteed to not happen. We need 3D printing everywhere, without restrictions or payload attached.

Considering India's low literacy, having a state owned cyber safety app shouldn't be much of an issue. It's not like a backdoor, but safety of citizens, which is the prime mandate of a sovereign state.

Sounds like Google should be the one leading the charge against this. Will be interesting to see what they do.

> The app is mainly designed to help users block and track lost or stolen smartphones across all telecom networks, using a central registry.

It's an app. That's all it does now (presumably). Once installed, it can be changed in the future to do all kinds of terrible things. This is big brother.

Reuters/BBC have been famous to pounce and sensationalizing.

And they claim to protect people from fraud / phishing / scams.

> https://x.com/shantanugoel/status/1995874411543671208

>> sanchaarsaathi.dot AT gmail dot com >> broadbandmission AT gmail dot com

In short, the arguments for this seems to stink?

So while this state-owned cyber safety app is authoritarian, I wonder if it reflects just the most practical way India’s government can achieve the same things that the US has.

It's happening, and it's time we say no. It's uncomfortable, but we need to do it en masse, right now.

Do not buy backdoored hardware, help others get rid of the backdoors, use anonymous technology to organize protests.

There has to be a line.

The perversion is that you are legally responsible for what happens with your device, but you are unable to prevent others from using it as they wish. An app like this is automation for putting people into jail. Just upload some illegal content and then "detect it". There's literally nothing you can do to defend against this attack, and it will work until it's overused.

I was getting these messages for sometime and installed it finally. It is the same app that is mentioned in the article. My phone is already in the system then.

A lot of people in this thread seem unaware of what SIM cards actually are and do.

Govt can't have their population at large being scammed by criminals and do relatively nothing about it. It's a huge economic and productivity drain people seem to have "accepted as normal".

So how do you not shut down and arrest these greedy international corporations, which would disrupt a country's infrastructure, despite ongoing warnings? Force them.

To me it's akin to the US govt mandating software that allows users to report any and all spam, fully traceable to criminals and providers, whom the govt could prosecute/heavily fine 100% of the time. Dangerous 2-edged sword, but if takes down that despicable scam industry, later it can transition to a law mandating the same protection but in a privacy a preserving manner.

Anyway, that doesn't in any way negate that this is shit for the people of India.

this last year i'm seeing very concerning behavior in students in the 14-20 range. complete addiction to their phones. very deep interests in things i was completely unaware that they existed. similar to how when i started noticing anime girlfriends/waifus in 2016.

about 40% are deep in discord communities where i literally cannot figure out a single sentence of what they're talking about.

if society doesn't do something, and soon, say goodbye to the cognitive ability of a large chunk of future generations.

For the safety and security of children, of course.

Ah yes, so because someone has stolen MY phone, I should give up all my right to privacy and allow the government to have their claws in my phone.

Logic. What a silly point to make when 'findmyphone' services, which are OPT-IN litterally do the same thing.

More and more it seems like the benefits of being connected are not worth the cost of being so visible to so many hostile (state and non-state) actors

But societal combined risk is commonly handled in this way. In the US, if you employ someone you have to report that you paid them to a central federal government. Way to track someone? Surveillance state? All words you could use.

And the government previously restricted gambling and so on. The question isn't "why would a bad government do these things?". The question is "would a benevolent government do these things?" and "if so, why?". And the answer is quite straightforward, I think:

Someone in the government has observed that there is a great deal of cyber crime in India. A fairly uneducated population, with very high smart-phone penetration (85%+ apparently), and a large number of fraudulent actors that their federal government is unable to enforce against. So they're attempting to attack the problem where they can.

This is ultimately India. They don't need insidious "app on your phone" / stingray / any other sophisticated solution. The local politicians can manipulate local authorities to get your cell tower association data and SMS. And if they want your comms devices they will rubber-hose the secrets out of you.

Someone I know worked at a big FAANG. He's Indian so went back to Bangalore to see his ailing mother. One day he took an auto-rickshaw while wearing his FAANG sweatshirt. The driver took him to a makeshift jail where he, police officers, and a magistrate conspired to threaten the guy with prison unless he paid $10k. $10k is nothing to a FAANG engineer, so he paid up, was brought in front of court on some lesser charges and then had to pay a small fine (much less than $10k). And then he flew back to the West Coast and never returned to India. Trying to reason about this kind of place using the perspective of the West is meaningless.

I think it unlikely they're trying to use this as cyber-surveillance. India simply does not have the infrastructure necessary to do that at scale. And they have the infrastructure for the rubber-hose, and Indians wear their identification on their sleeve, so to speak. Names point to ethnic groups and castes. Primarily endogamous marriage means if you want to perform violence against groups you can simply spread out from one member of the family unit being visibly of that group.

Using an app to get access to someone's data there is sort of like using Heartbleed to get root on a machine on which you are in /etc/sudoers with NOPASSWD.

Enough is enough...

Without domestic silicon or OS, you're forced to mandate bloatware that users can see

Real power operates at the silicon/firmware level, invisible, unremovable, and uncompromisable

This is a cringe move from India

https://www.centerforcybersecuritypolicy.org/insights-and-re...