I abhor any decision that robs even a grain of my individual freedom.
India is currently run by a nationalist regime headed by the so called "butcher of Gujarat"[1], there isn't much that would shock me wrt to that lot's totalitarian tendencies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Narendra_Modi
Like sure you could in theory see every document I've ever signed if you have a warrant for BankID servers, but you could probably glean most of that if you had a warrant for the banks servers anyway, so it's not really a new capability.
[1]: https://e-estonia.com/digital-id-protecting-against-surveill...
It's a single point of failure. Digital ID servers on creation because as valuable to compromise as value_of_bank_hack*bank_count plus whatever other services are rolled in.
Furthermore now only one warrant is needed, or one illegal executive order. Take the USA as a live example - legal protections aren't actually real, a government official with enough political power can just do whatever they want while the courts struggle to keep up, and then just ignore court orders.
If your identity is spread out in many different ways, at least then there's more friction to compromise. Just because one bank capitulates doesn't mean the actor immediately has health information on you, for example. Just because the unemployment office capitulates doesn't mean the actor has your financial records.
My current interpretation is that they are fear mongering about violence because they are actually way more racist than they admit publicly, and might want to remove more people than they were letting on initially.
So okay you can definitely disagree with that, and how you feel about it can definitely be influenced by how much you feel threatened (personally or network) and that’s valid.
But why do we think that they are using this as a ruse to like become despotically authoritarian in general? Do we think that the borders were opened intentionally to fabricate this “crisis”? If not, it would be such a huge coincidence, because there are a zillion reasons to be concerned about the demographic situation without needing to use it as a smokescreen, what are the odds that this problem organically appeared and then they happen to be able to take advantage of it?
Note that I’m not asserting that the borders weren’t opened intentionally to fabricate this problem to which they can react with a “solution”, that sounds exactly like something a government would do. I just don’t hear anyone saying that out loud, at least, and having personal network or moral values or whatever threatened and reacting to that just seems a lot more likely to me as a reason why people feel like the world is ending.
Probably because the actions being taken are against people of every category; illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and naturally born citizens.
As has been noted, _anyone_ not being entitled due process means _nobody_ is entitled to due process. Because then can kidnap you, claim you're "of a group not entitled to due process", and do whatever they want to you. And you can't push back because you're not in that group... because you need due process to do that.
> But why do we think that they are using this as a ruse to like become despotically authoritarian in general?
At some point, you have to call a duck a duck. They're doing things that despotically authoritarian would do, over and over. They may or may not _think_ that's what their goal is, but it clearly is.
Are you referring to getting arrested and released due to some suspicion (let’s say the suspicion is always fabricated for the sake of argument), or deported, or something else?
On due process, if someone accidentally gets a free flight to a foreign country, that totally sucks and they should be paid compensation, but let’s not pretend that deportation is the same as what authoritarian regimes typically do. Have people disappeared off the face of the earth? I think the Germans of the ‘30s would have a very different reputation if they had simply attempted to deport all the Jews…
Quite low. Borders weren't open to fabricate an excuse to engage in authoritarianism - the excuse was simply fabricate, whole-cloth, with no basis in reality to justify it.
There is no immigration problem in the USA. Large portions of the American economy are dependent on immigration, documented or otherwise. Immigrants, documented or otherwise, commit less crimes per-capita than USA citizens.
So, the current government is using immigration as a flash-point to get themselves elected, and as an ongoing distraction away from their failure to address their other platform (affordability). Getting to be more authoritarian is the stated goal, based on the plan outlined in "Project 2025."
Well this is a controversial statement. Many people have thought there was an immigration problem in the USA since well before Trump entered politics.
If I pretend to believe that there is definitely no immigration problem, though, then I agree with you. But like I said, that is a controversial statement.
Would you believe that the people who support this just do believe there is an immigration problem? People are allowed to care about things other than the economy and crime stats, by the way.
I've been trying to make sense of the statistics. Interested to hear any explanation that can reconcile these contrasting observations.
It doesn't seem like those should matter so much, but it really does make everything about democracy easier.
Things get much weirder when the population isn't so low or isn't relatively concentrated.
you apply to or for anything.. and they just give you the option of authorizing via singpass.. and you use your passkey-like singpass app to authorize it... and its done!
you go to hospital and they need your medical records? singpass
you go to university and they need your academic history? singpass
you apply for bank loan? insurance? license? food handling permit? singpass
Or is there some way to restrict which party gets which data?
https://docs.developer.singpass.gov.sg/docs/getting-started/...
https://docs.developer.singpass.gov.sg/docs/data-catalog-myi...
As part of the flow you’ll be shown the list of data that’s being requested.
Convenience - what you’re describing is convenience
It’s totally fine if you prioritize that over everything else, but my only thought here is that everyone should be crystal clear in what they are trading off for convenience
It’s convenient for the government too, tk have a single identifier to thread a persons entire life
We are, sadly, well beyond any expectation of privacy, but we should at least be aware of it and try to not make it worse
Yes it's selling point is convenience. Convenience is good.
In this particular case I disagree that there's a price in privacy. At least currently, and the way the Swedish electronic ID is implemented, I don't see it.
With other variations there might be problems of course, though I'd worry more about someone messing up the security of it rather than privacy
You can never put the genie back in the bottle and you never know who will be in charge in 20 years
If trump was elected prime minister of Sweden, he wouldn't have been able to do half the stuff he's done.
We can all play "I struggle to see" and throw out weak arguments but it does not advance the topic
You just said "privacy" and pretended that's an argument
For those who don’t know: by just looking up a name, you can find a persons birthday, address, who also lives there. Oh and the person’s salary is public too.
Ridiculous.
It's a driver's licence infringing on my privacy too? Cause they're mostly the same, at least the way they're implemented in Sweden
The point is that the more identifiable information that the monopoly on violence has the easier it is for something, anything really, to be used against you should your tribal affiliation conflict with the ruling party.
This is like politics 101
Once the infrastructure for mass surveillance is available, States are tempted to use it.
Also even if it may be ok in Sweden for cultural reasons, the rest of the world unfortunately isn't (but can enjoy private washing machines in exchange).
Yep, I'm with you, I agree that the underlying power plays are fully harmonious with global (and globalist) trends.
With "nationalist" I was referring to the BJP's "hindutva" ideology, which is essentially a nation-centric ideology of "India for Hindus" (minorities and non-upper-caste/non-brahmanic forms of Hinduism be damned).
1. Modi is considered Other Backward Class which is a low caste.
2. Hindutva ideology according to Savarkar, who came up with the term, is that Hindu is a national identity not a religious one. Sindu became Hindu in Persian, and Indus in Greek. And the Sindu was a river. So the Hindutva ideology is in reference to the people on the other side of the Sindu river. This is why Hindutva literally translates to Hinduness. I understand that this doesn't always translate into religious tolerance of Muslims (yes, I say specifically Muslims) but that is because the RSS was formed to counter attacks on Hindus by Muslims in the 1920s. Hedgewar (Founder of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh): A Definitive Biography by Sachin Nandha was a super informative deep dive into the BJP/RSS.
3. Modi has a 70%+ approval rate even after more than 10 years in power. So his government is popular and the results of the BJP's power are hard to ignore in terms of the infrastructure and India now being the 4th largest economy.
The claim that there aren’t other religions is not true because a lot of lower caste folks have explicitly converted to Christianity and or Dalit Buddhism as promoted by Ambedkar who was the driving force behind rights for lower castes in India.
I note that you are posting under an anonymous id.
Requiring identification in situations that don't need it is where the problems start, but that's possible with analog IDs as well, and is often even worse there (since these provide neither security against digital copies, nor privacy, which digital ID can, e.g. via zero knowledge proofs).
Small external signers with a display and confirmation button are a nice compromise (and also largely solve MITM!), since I don't mind an external device being under somebody else's administrative control as long as I can run what I want on my smartphone or computer.
But people don't want to carry two things... Hopefully we can at least have both as alternatives going forward.
It can be moved into a security processor within the smartphone's SOC.
Which is exactly the argument against digital ID, because it reduces the friction to asking for ID in situations that don't need it, causing it to become epidemic.
Meanwhile nearly all the instances where ID actually should be required are also instances where showing up in person should be required, like taking out your first line of credit with a financial institution, or signing on to a new job. Because the entire point is to verify that that person is the person on the ID and not someone in Russia who managed to hack their phone.
Or be forced to install yet another ID app from a private service that requires you have an iPhone or "compatible" Android.
The debate about this in the UK is just crazy. Notwithstanding the current "febrile" state of politics. It has always received weirdly vitriolic push back.
What really is the Government going to do with a digital ID service that they can't do already?
I just want to be able to give estate agents, solicitors, a bank, etc my ID number and a time-limited code that proves I am in control of that ID (or however that might work), and be done with it.
In 20 years, the UK suffers a terrorist attack just before an election, and then elects a ultra right wing government on a platform of "remigrating foreigners." You're a British born citizen but your mom fled from Iran in the 80s and immigrated to the UK.
If you don't have digital ID, and the government decides to "remigrate all Iranians," they have to collect information from several different government groups, e.g. maybe your mom got a passport in which case one government agency may just know she's a non-native British citizen but nothing more. Maybe your immigration agency stands up to the government and engages in legal battles to prevent turning over immigration information.
However if there's a digital ID system that lets the government instantly know everything about a person, you lose the protection of friction.
I believe this is one of the fundamental premises of representative liberal democracy, and one of its most redeeming features: balance of power is spread not just between branches of government, but through ministries/departments/agencies, which makes it much harder for a despot to do despotism.
“ICE was confirmed by independent review and U.S. judges to have violated laws including the Immigration Act of 1990 by interrogating and detaining people without warrants or review of their citizenship status”
Given that dragnet operations result in all sorts of random people being deported, including citizens, and given that sometimes these people are deported to countries where they face violence or death, you are arguing for state-sponsored violence without due process. Other than people immigrating, what other circumstances do you feel justify the elimination of due process?
Suppose there is a law against being Jewish.
In the case of ID cards and the like, the state does not rule over the populace, it rules on behalf of the populace. I am innocent and they work for me. Hence, I do not have to prove to some random government agent who I am unless it is relevant to the task they perform, e.g.
- the police have a reasonable and justifiable suspicion that I am engaged in criminal activity - an immigration officer may only ask for my details when I am crossing a border or, again, have some reasonable and justifiable suspicion that I am in need of deportation etc. - Or perhaps I just need some documents from my local municipal office, and they rightly ask who I am and to prove it before giving out my private info.
Me going about my business is no business of the government's until I start abusing the rules.
The opposite view is that:
- I am ruled over - Any agent of the government can question me and prevent me from going about my business
Of course, in practice, the application of such liberal principles like not requiring ID to go about my day are often not done well, but to change the principle is to change the entire character of the most fundamental aspects of Englishness. You'll note, much of the continent lurches between different forms of collectivist oppressive government whereas, until of late, the UK has not. This is because of the lack of this fundamental principle there, I am sure of that, and those calling for these kind of ID laws, digital or otherwise, are not to be entertained.
The most interesting case will be the USA, where they still care about the principles of English liberty, far more than the English do.
A good current example is the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill which very much is based on the idea that the state, rather than parents, is primarily responsible for children. The Online Safety Act reflects much the same thinking.
I think there has been a cultural change. Both from the state, and from people who expect to be told what to do to a greater extent than the past.
Because, as the Home Secretary herself observed, it would fundamentally change the relationship between the individual and the state.
> What really is the Government going to do with a digital ID service that they can't do already?
This gives the impression of having done no research into a topic of which you now opine opposition to be "weirdly vitriolic". We live in an age of search engines and GPTs, free encyclopaedias and entire lecture series online, and even libraries are still open and free, but you've done nothing to get past the very first thoughts you've had on the subject.
Was that weirdly vitriolic, or someone pointing out that an argument to undermine everyone's rights should have some effort behind it?
I addressed their unkind and ad hominem argument. If you think me unkind then I will shrug and say, in hacker parlance, they should RTFM. They have not put in the slightest work before opining and criticising, and on something as important as this?
May they receive such weird vitriol until they learn to at least Google first. Doesn't it automatically run a GPT for you now? They, and surely the people around them, will thank me for instilling such basic discipline.
Or just complain about “kindness” more - it’s easier to accuse others of being mean than to look in a mirror, I suppose.
India's government is not termed 'nationalist' because of this one policy.
It's really 4 horsemen of the infocalypse garbage being trotted out, and the general population is clueless and credulous. "They're in charge, surely they must know what they're doing! They wouldn't lie to us! They most assuredly have our collective best interests in mind, and they'll do the right thing!"
Literally nobody thinks that.
Unfortunately most people don't have the time or energy to fight every emerging attack on freedom.
Everything is going to plan for the billionaire class.
Eventually everything will burn, only time will tell if it will be from global warming or food riots.
People trust elected officials, they trust institutions, they trust "experts", the media, the academics. A vast majority of people don't realize the scale of ineptitude amongst the people who wield power. Most of the "elites" are not overqualified geniuses, but instead average bumbling idiots who stumbled their way into office, or sociopaths, or physically attractive. Most political systems do not reward competence and diligence.
You could swap out all 535 congress people in the US for randomly selected citizens and I guarantee you that outcomes would improve. Things are going so badly because they're intended to go badly, because unethical people wield power for self enrichment and cronyism. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Between the electoral college, gerrymandering and 2 Senators per state regardless of population, the minority control who gets elected.
Not to mention that anyone who trusts the police is naive.
> Literally nobody thinks that.
I'd have to disagree; I'd say this is the modal perspective.
It does help the discussion here, the comment correctly points out how this literal 1984-esque action plays into the current regime's totalitarian tendencies which go way before the 2002 pogrom and of course their parent org, RSS which is a whole other can of worms.
> It does help the discussion here, the comment correctly points out how this literal 1984-esque action plays into the current regime's totalitarian tendencies which go way before the 2002 pogrom and of course their parent org, RSS which is a whole other can of worms.
Who decided that those riots were a progrom? That term itself is misleading.
I am not fan of this step but the problems it's designed to tackle are huge in India and it's very much an option unless there are solid alternatives.
I note that you are posting under an anonymous id.
Anybody who has even a passing knowledge of network/endpoint security knows that you need state intervention in the absence of widespread knowledge of cyber security threats in the populace. And no this is not a danger to the largest democracy in the world.
At least in the US, the Supreme Court is anything but impartial. Judges typically vote along party lines.
They've also restricted the government's ability to change this system.
See the NJAC debacle for example.
The only difference between western nations and others is that western countries butcher people in other countries.
Have you ever spoken to people from islamic countries and about their views towards the west?
With all the mobile tracking tech, I would have thought that it would have been easier to catch the person if they had a working phone on them.
Good one. Do you see how dumb the average consumer is? They don't know or care even if you try to educate them.
There's no point in being able to buy an outrageously fancy toilet with remittances if there's no sewer to hook it up to.
This is the most secure option:
This is more flexible and will give you root, at the cost of an unlocked bootloader:
Give it a few years and suddenly China is no longer worse than democracies.
Modi and his clique are authoritarian though. It's interesting that so many indian vote for that clique. They seem to not understand the problem domain; similar to Hungary, too. (Don't even get me going on Trump's clique of superrich running the show. I recently watched CNN in the last days and I fail to see how CNN is any better than Foxnews - they manipulate people via what they broadcast. For instance, yesterday some random US general basically convincing people that nobody in the military would do double-tap, not even Hegseth, when the exact opposite has actually happened. Or some female today in a show trying to explain that the first attack on a fisher boat was "legal" anyway. People don't even realise how much they are manipulated by these private media entities. These are basically owned by superrich influencing people one way or the other.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Delhi_car_explosion
Planned and executed by highly educated, qualified, doctors.
A much more achievable goal is digging up dirt on specific people and opponents. In the end governments can struggle to justify how they got their hands on info about an affair you had or that you shocked dogs ~~on stream~~.
Such device backdoors are just a get-out-court-free card and a way for the media to justify not asking any serious questions.
An absence of surveillance causes increased frequency of terrorist attacks which causes people to demand solutions (necessarily involving surveillance and other authoritarian measures) which leads to increased surveillance. It's an unfortunate negative feedback loop.
If you lack solutions for too long, the negative feedback loop becomes severe and instead of just surveillance within a liberal democratic context, you get public safety authoritarians like Bukele or Duterte.
"Surveillance doesn't materially reduce terrorist attacks" - I am not sure about that based on the number of arrests of plotters and the lack of visibility I have into the tools and methods they used to find those plotters.
"Terrorist attacks still happen even with surveillance" - Yes, but if they happen less frequently, this reduces the demand from the public to ratchet up authoritarianism. See the problem?
"Terrorist attacks are a price worth paying for our freedom." - I mostly agree, but feeling like this doesn't make any difference to the negative feedback loop, does it? Regular people want public safety from physical danger almost as much as food and water.
Bukele and Duterte did not rise out of an environment of terrorism, so I don't know why you thought it relevant to bring them up. I think it is really sad to see comments on HN of all places advocating that if we don't implement chat control we'll spiral into a lawless hellscape.
My point is that my subjective judgment counts for nothing, because the negative feedback loop that I described is a society-wide phenomenon beyond my control as an individual. Asking the majority of people to think the way you do about terrorism is somewhere between wishcasting and virtue signalling. It doesn't interrupt the causality behind the negative feedback loop, so it therefore fails to outline a path that can be trodden in the real world to achieve your desired vision of no surveillance.
I urge everyone to banish this mode of thinking which fixates on what "should" happen without first checking whether that desired end state is a possible world we can exist in once you factor in the second and third order effects beyond the control of any individual.
> Bukele and Duterte did not rise out of an environment of terrorism
Move your abstraction one level higher. They arose out of public safety concerns around murder and drugs and gangs. Those are not terrorism, but they fit under the same umbrella of public safety concerns that motivate regular people to demand authoritarian solutions.
The degree of cyber fraud in India is beyond insane.
Also - funnily enough - Indian telecom companies are meant to be fined for every SIM card given out under false data. There is already meant to be a check that stops this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
This is extreme and just as bad as any other extreme.
We have to find a way to maximise freedom across society. Being fixated on personal freedom won't turn out well. Whose personal freedom are we talking about? Should your neighbour be free to move the fence into your land? Didn't think so.
I will, however, give the benefit of the doubt and assume you mean giving up freedom without gaining anything. I don't see how this isn't a net loss for society.
Silly goose.
"Freedom" is always balanced against "Responsibility" (both Individual and Group); it can never be absolute. The latter needs State support.
That is the reason my "freedom" to rob you is curtailed by the "State's (i.e. Group's) responsibility" enacting laws to prevent it.
You also exercise "your (i.e. Individual) responsibility" when you put a lock on your valuables to prevent my robbing you.
Living in a society already means giving up more than a grain of personal freedom.
Try entering a store naked.
The real deal is the balance between loss and gain
I'm strongly against surveillance like this, but saying you won't give up a grain of freedom is not realistic.
Which doesn't work. At all. A familiarity with the last 40 years of computing makes that clear.
The only things that have worked: ios/android walled gardens so users can't install spyware. yubikeys which can't be phished. etc.
...of course, it won't work and even if they honestly tried it will be outpaced by scam industry. Or at worst case be state exploit that then will be exploited by other state (or just malicious actors) coz of lack of security in "security" software
Will take decades if not more than a century to implement in India. Let alone old people, even the boomer generation is immensely tech illiterate.
Now you have at least two problems
If they were to require digital ID for pensions or disability benefits there would be more problems.
The devices include: A Playstation Portable. The latest stats include thousands of visits from XBox and Playstation consoles.
All modern smartphone requirements boil down to Play Integrity and iOS AppStore attestations.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven...
Undoubtedly most people will comply, but there will be a few who don't, so I'm curious what the plan is to bring them in line.
The UK government hasn't decided yet how digital ID will work, currently it's just a talking point. Probably it will be an app that you install, like the NHS app. Nobody is proposing that it be installed by default.
Apple separately announced that a Digital ID feature will be built into iOS[0] which the UK may use or not use.
> few who don't, so I'm curious what the plan is to bring them in line
They will be told by their employer to get it otherwise they will lose their job. Just the same as now, only at the moment you need a paper passport rather than a smartphone.
[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/11/apple-introduces-digi...
Whether it comes pre-installed or not is a distinction without difference if you need it for daily life
Edit: In fact, it would be better if it came pre-installed (and be removable) because then you don't need to agree to Google's terms of service to get the APK file. You would get it straight from your OS vendor which is presumably a trusted party if you intend on using that device. (Governments are usually not so forward-thinking that they let you get the APK file from the govt website directly without needing to go through commercial entities for something as essential as a national healthcare app. That would be an even better solution...)
You do not have to use the NHS app. There is a website version.
> Just the same as now, only at the moment you need a paper passport rather than a smartphone.
Which demonstrates how little it achieves. People already need some form of ID for lots of things (notably work and renting housing). It does not have to be a passport though.
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?
That much is believable, if not on the low side. Spam there is intense.
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.
It was a very insecure rollout with zero customer awareness, but it happened and almost every large bank moved. Sometimes silly pronouncements do result in silly change.
Allow the user to download and install it if it turns out to be great. Do not shove things down people's throat against their wishes, like an authoritarian govt. Otherwise you start to resemble Stalin's Soviet Union.
Personally I wouldn't risk my personal digital privacy on the incompetence of the government. I'd assume the opposite.
Maybe you were thinking about PIX in Brazil which is developed and operated by their central bank.
It's controlled by the RBI, just through a complex public-private corporate structure through NPCI.
UPI is much larger and more international than PIX. It's currently processing iirc something like 200 billion transactions. UPI is also used in several countries, France being among the most recent examples.
As such UPI has a broader scope than PIX and requires a public-private corporate structure with stakeholders from both sides.
But this is off topic. The competence of the Indian government to at the very minimum partner with Industry shows that such software preloaded on phones is a threat to the civil liberties of people that the State shouldn't encroach on. This is a violation of individual privacy.
It makes filing an online complaint against the incoming call almost frictionless.
Having said that, I don't believe it should be shoved down our throats.
You are just telling the whole world about the average IQ of an Indian and how they believe in foolish things like "digital arrest".
And an app doesn't solve that. Digital literacy is a need for today, but the entire country is getting the latest smartphone, with dirt cheap data and zero knowledge of how to operate and own that technology.
Not saying I agree or disagree but your reply comes across as passive aggressive to me. Not that the parent post makes pleasant insinuations either, to be fair...
Yeah, no. Correlation is not causation. Having the app installed doesn't eliminate calls. The app doesn't have the ability to block calls.
Operators like Airtel stepped up and started flagging spam/scam and now warn their users when they recieve a call from flagged numbers.
I've been reporting spammers since 2005, since DND rules came into place.
Only in the last year have I seen the spam slow down. Earlier operators would dismiss the complaint saying to it was a "transactional communication," now it's logged with TRAI and the operator and they have less room to manipulate the complaint.
Simply installing Sanchar Sathi won’t eliminate spam calls, which was my point.
To praise Indian government is the most unlikely thing one should be doing for their mediocrity at developing things.
Same is the case with Aadhar, Digiyatra, etc. My government is hella incompetent at safeguarding data and privacy (unless it's their own data). And this app is 100% going to be a huge security hole on every device.
For me, ADB to the resuce.
Wait until "they" outsource it (on the pretext of national security interests) to countries that have deep talent in cybersecurity (like the US/Israel/Russia/China).
Ex: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/06/11/india-orders-new-fig...
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.
There are lots of ways to solve for this, mandating that these companies own the identification process through their systems, report misuse, govern apps. Why taken on the ownership of a process that is better handled outside of government while the government holds them to account via huge fines and timelines but giving these large companies ownership of protection from scams or stolen phones etc...? win win and I think these large companies are due spending extra money to protect their users anyway.
What's inherent in the comment is- there are simply too many people to educate, "made aware", etc. So, this might be a knee-jerk reaction to fight cyber fraud. Not Big Brother sensorship.
I can say these because I know too much about the ground reality. An example from top of my head- SBI e-Rupee app doesn't launch in your phone if you have Discord installed. Yeah. Just because some scammers communicated through Discord.
Of course, I cannot guarantee that something sinister is not being planned or that this app won't be utilized for something bad.
There is also a small chance of some bureaucrat in management position taking this decision, so he can write in his report- "Made Sanchar Saathi app download soar up to X millions in 3 months through diligent effort..." just like highly placed PMs/SVPs in large tech companies eyeing a promotion.
This statement seems naive at best and manipulative at worst.
Combined with worst enforcement and investigation efforts to tackle this issue. The default resolution on a cyber crime report is : Fraudster's account is blocked and they are given a choice to plead forgiveness from the accuser. They often return the money in lieu of the complaint being rescinded. Then fraudster is free to con others. Fraudsters know this is a numbers game that is why they hit every morsel they can get a bite.
Worse yet people use the cyber crime provision to take revenge. People can file frivolous cases without proof and ge others account locked. Banks will treat you with disdain and police will tell you to settle privately too.
What about investigations you ask? Very few cases reach that level. Local police file the FIR and they don't even know what is "cyber" in cyber crime. Fraudsters can continue playing the numbers game.
So, yes it is easy to talk about victims when the policies are lacking. And then this high number of victims can be used as a crutch to push insecure apps on everyone's phones. The worst part of it? They will get data and still remain clueless and inept in solving the high number of cyber crimes.
If it were up to the police, then we wouldn’t even hear about 25% of the cases.
I don't think this new app will resolve India's fraud issues unfortunately, there probably needs to be more policy changes at banks/fincos. As much as India obsesses with KYC processes, it doesn't seem to be working/enough. I don't see this new app being required as something totalitarian, it would be much easier for the gov to ask for that type of stuff to be tacked on to UPI apps anyways.
The number of my relatives that will just believe whatever someone tells them on the phone is terrifying.
Based on what?
> Another huge issue is unregulated loan apps
You don't need to root everyone's phones to regulate financial crime.
> Then there are obvious security issues with terrorism and organized crime
India is building a centralised backdoor into every phone in the country. That's a massive national security risk.
Yahoo Finance report that's 3 years old, puts India at #4: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/15-countries-most-cyber-crime...
But 2024 data from PIB puts the number of occurrence much higher at 2.27 million: https://www.pib.gov.in/PressNoteDetails.aspx?NoteId=155384&M...
> You don't need to root everyone's phones to regulate financial crime.
Yes, I agree. Read this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46113070
> India is building a centralised backdoor into every phone in the country. That's a massive national security risk.
Are these what backdoors are? It's an app. It can be uninstalled, right? Are there physical backdoors like American agency NSA tried to install? Or like the Chinese phones that many suspect?
- https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/privacy-scandal-n...
- https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/xiaomis-phones-had-a-securi...
I'm not familiar with Indian activist tradition. But if we look at other countries where this happened, the technical attacks didn't work. It had to be done through policy, instead.
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.
Looks like it's quire popular/established already, with over 10 million downloads. Basically a "portal" for basic digital safety/hygiene related services.
Quoting Perplexity regarding what facilities the app offers:
1. Chakshu: Report suspicious calls, SMS, or WhatsApp for scams like impersonation, fake investments, or KYC frauds.
2. Block Lost/Stolen Phones: Trace and block devices across all telecom networks using IMEI; track if reactivated.
3. Check Connections in Your Name: View and disconnect unauthorized numbers linked to your ID.
4. Verify Device Genuineness: Confirm if a phone (new or used) is authentic before purchase.
DisplayDialog("Yup, perfectly genuine, trust me!");
This is on the far end of the spectrum of bad.
This is an extremely important point of universal application that can't be emphasized too much.
Even if one agrees with a current politician's position, once the precedent is set, there's nothing stopping an administration down the line extending the reach of an already installed and by then socially accepted mechanism.
Someone called this the "totalitarian tip toe"; that guy (who shall rename unnamed) was "a bit weird", but his concept stands anyway imo.
Steelmanning the argument, perhaps you see this as a demonstration that corporate power has gotten so large the government is being forced to react. I might believe that, but I can’t get from there to irrelevance.
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.
> The November 28 order, seen by Reuters, gives major smartphone companies 90 days to ensure that the government's Sanchar Saathi app is pre-installed on new mobile phones, with a provision that users cannot disable it.
This sounds great in theory. But in practice this sort of thing is rife for abuse. Say, I have complete control over what this app installed on your phone does in the background. And you were my political opponent. Would you trust me to not use this backdoor into your phone to my advantage?
Apps like Netflix, GMail are not forced on users by a govt. It is an open marketplace. Users have options. They are free to buy phones that do not have those apps pre-installed.
> Pre-installed App must be Visible, Functional, and Enabled for users at first setup. Manufacturers must ensure the App is easily accessible during device setup, with no disabling or restriction of its features
While I can get behind the stated goals, the lack of any technical details is frustrating. The spartan privacy policy page[2] lists the following required permissions:
> For Android: Following permission are taken in android device along with purpose:
> - Make & Manage phone calls: To detect mobile numbers in your phone.
> - Send SMS: To complete registration by sending the SMS to DoT on 14422.
> - Call/SMS Logs: To report any Call/SMS in facilities offered by Sanchar Saathi App.
> - Photos & files: To upload the image of Call/SMS while reporting Call/SMS or report lost/stolen mobile handset.
> - Camera: While scanning the barcode of IMEI to check its genuineness.
Only the last two are mentioned as required on iOS. From a newspaper article on the topic[3]:
> Apple, for instance, resisted TRAI’s draft regulations to install a spam-reporting app, after the firm balked at the TRAI app’s permissions requirements, which included access to SMS messages and call logs.
Thinking aloud, might cryptographic schemes exist (zero knowledge proofs) which allow the OS to securely reveal limited and circumscribed attributes to the Govt without the "all or nothing", blanket permissions? To detect that an incoming call is likely from a spam number, a variant of HIBP's k-Anonymity[4] should seemingly suffice. I'm not a cryptographer but hope algorithms exist, or could be created, to cover other legitimate fraud prevent use cases.
It is a common refrain, and a concern I share, that any centralized store of PII data is inherently an attractive target; innumerable breaches should've taught everyone that. After said data loss, (a) there's no cryptographically guaranteed way for victims to know it happened, to avoid taking on the risk of searching through the dark web; (b) they can't know whether some AI has been trained to impersonate them that much better; (c) there's no way to know which database was culpable; and (d) for this reason, there's no practical recourse.
I recently explained my qualms with face id databases[5], for which similar arguments apply.
[1] https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2197140&re...
[2] https://sancharsaathi.gov.in/Home/app-privacy-policy.jsp
[3] https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/pre-install-san...
[4] https://www.troyhunt.com/understanding-have-i-been-pwneds-us...
- Report fraud/scam calls and SMS directly from your phone.
- Block or track lost/stolen phones by disabling their IMEI so they can’t be misused.
- View all mobile numbers registered under your ID and report any unauthorized SIM cards.
- Verify if a phone is genuine with an IMEI/device authenticity check.
- Report telecom misuse, such as spoofed calls or suspicious international numbers.
The stated goal is protect users from digital fraud and safer telecom usage, who knows how good it’ll be. Probably a PITA.
Not to mention they can probably payload anything into the app whenever they want.
I was getting 5-6 scam calls per day, now down to maybe 1 in a month.
It's just a wrapper around their website (for now).
I think this app is harmless but I don't think it should be forced onto anyone.
It may be today. And you have no way to know for sure. But there is also no way to know what the app will do down the road when a politician you do not trust is in control of it.
CDOT's CMS system already exists in the background.
How do you think it works? Example: If enough people report, then some police agency investigates? Rinse and repeat enough times and the scam calls/SMS should fall?
On IOS, you still have to copy/paste the incoming number into a form, provide a screenshot of the message, date/time and it uploads the complaint to their systems.
They inform you that they will not send updates.
What I've observed is a huge drop in scammers, and new scammers get tagged as potential spam by the operator upfront. So they're doing something on the back end.
You can only file a police complaint if you actually suffered monetary loss. I haven't, so I don't know how that works.
The other benefit is that you can keep an eye on id theft used to get connections using your info. This is a huge problem in rural India. Scammers use this to create bank accounts to move money.
That's what the ruckus is: the govt wants to push it everywhere mandatorily.
Right now it's harmless: it's just a way to report scammers and lost handsets.
But who knows what they'll shovel into it tomorrow.
Basically IMEI stamping because sim card purchase with ID has come to be viewed as flawed/compromised by NatSec types in India. Here's some additional context from a previous thread on HN [0]
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40476498
------
Edit: Can't reply
Lots of old phones still exist, so a virtual/eSIM does nothing to give visibility into those devices.
Also, India wants to own the complete end-to-end supply chain for electronics like what China did in the early 2010s, so India has been subsidizing legacy, highly commodified electronic component manufacturing [0] - of which physical SIMs are a major component because they both help subsidize semiconductor packaging as well as IoT/Smart Card manufacturing. A mix of international [1][2] and domestic players [3] have been leveraging physical SIM manufacturing in India as a way to climb up the value chain.
On a separate note, this is why I keep harping about India constantly - I'm starting to see the same trends and strategies arising in Delhi like those we'd see the PRC use in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but no one listened to me about China back then because they all had their priors set to the 1990s.
No one took the PRC seriously until it was too late, and a similar thing could arise with India - we as the US cannot win in a world where 3 continental countries (Russia, China, India) are ambivalent to antagonistic against us. Even Indian policy papers and makers increasingly reference and even copying the Chinese model when thinking about policy or industrial development, and I've started seeing Indian LEO types starting to operate abroad in major ASEAN and African countries helping their vendors build NatSec capacity (cough cough Proforce - not the American one - and their Offensive Sec teams).
Ironically, I've found Chinese analysts to be much more realistic about India's capacity [4][5] unlike Western commentators - and China has taken action as a result [6][7][8]
[0] - https://ecms.meity.gov.in/
[1] - https://www.idemia.com/press-release/idemias-production-faci...
[2] - https://www.trasna.io/blog/trasna-eyes-asian-iot-growth-as-i...
[3] - https://seshaasai.com/products/esim-and-sim
[4] - https://finance.sina.cn/china/gjcj/2022-06-08/detail-imizmsc...
[5] - https://www.gingerriver.com/p/vietnam-or-india-which-one-wil...
[6] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-02/foxconn-p...
[7] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-taking-steps-mitig...
[8] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-files-wto-complain...
Why not mandate virtual SIMs?
Yes. Apple's revenues are half as much as the government of India's [1][2]. That's a resource advantage that gives Cupertino real leverage against New Delhi.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-reports-fourth-... $102.5bn / quarter
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen... $827bn / year
The moment mobile companies locked down sideloading, ability to uninstall bundled software, etc., they made it impossible to argue techincally against bundled, uninstallable software from the government.
They can both survive without each other. But neither is going to break the arrangement without a lot of pain. They have mutual leverage with each other, and that becomes particularly material when one stops treating India as a monolith.
> India can and will survive without Apple. Though having it in the country would be good for optics
Most people aren't content with merely surviving.
I think you overestimate the importance of Apple to India. It is just a company. And actually not the biggest employer or most tax paying one either.
Apple is not the only vendor in India and has also not the most sold phone.
If New Delhi wants to smite Apple it obviously can. That isn’t the question. It’s if Apple can bargain for a better deal. I think the answer is yes.
The starting point would be finding the fault lines between the folks in India arguing for this policy and those who don’t care or are hostile to it.
They'll probably try to make the app as non-shitty as they possibly can, and will probably leverage all kinds of geographical restrictions and whatnot to isolate the impact of these changes, but when threatened with a large market share hit, Apple will comply.
Also, they gave in to the CCP and always say ‘we obey the laws of the countries in which we operate’.
Apple is, at the end of the day, just a business.
That creates obligations both ways. Put another way, Apple is an increasingly-major employer in India.
The real carrot New Delhi has is its growing middle class. The real carrot Apple has is its aspirational branding.
> they gave in to the CCP and always say ‘we obey the laws of the countries in which we operate'
Apple regularly negotiates and occasionally openly fights laws its disagrees with. This would be no different. Cupertino is anything but lazy and nihilistic. Mandated installation opens a door they've fought hard to keep shut because it carries global precedent.
For example, with the UK encryption debacle, Apple removed Advanced Data Protections (e2e encryption) for iCloud users in the UK. So users' notes, photos, emails are possibly open.
Why this isn’t being done at the SIM/baseband level is beyond me.
We lost the game when we allowed these players to impose limits on us in the way we can use the device that we bought with our hard earned money. Even modifying the root image of these OSes is treated like some sort of criminal activity. And there are enough people around ready to gaslight us with the stories about grandma's security, RF regulations, etc. Yet, its the extensive custom mods like Lineage OS that offer any form of security. Their extensive lockdown only leads to higher usage costs and a mountain of malware.
We really need to demand control over our own devices. We should fight to outlaw any restrictions on the ways we can use our own devices. We should strongly condemn and shame the people who try to gaslight us for their greed and duplicity.
They will.
All tech companies already comply with India's IT Act. And India now manufactures 44% of all iPhones sold in the US [0] while dangling the stick of a $38B anti-trust fine [6] but also the carrot of implementing China-style labor laws [10] that Apple lobbied for [11], so Apple doesn't have much of a choice because both China and Vietnam (the primary competitors for this segment of manufacturing) have similar regulations while not shielding them from Chinese competitors. Samsung is in the same boat at 25% of their manufacturing globally being done in India in CY24 [1] while is also trying to further entrench itself [2][8][9] due to existential competition from Chinese vendors [3][7].
Heck, Apple complied with similar regulations in Russia [7] before the Ukraine War despite being a smaller market than India with no Apple manufacturing, engineering, or capex presence.
All large companies who face existential threats from Chinese competitors have no choice but to entrench in India as it's the only large market with barriers against direct Chinese competition - ASEAN has an expansive FTA with China which has lead both South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan to lose their staying power in countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand where Chinese competitors are being given the red carpet, and Brazil is in the process of one as well.
And the Indian government is taking full advantage of this to get large companies to bend to Indian laws, as can be seen with the damocles sword of tax enforcement on Volkswagen [4] while negotiating an FTA with the EU and a potential $38B anti-trust fine against Apple [5] while negotiating a BTA with the US. It's the same playbook China used when it was in India's current position in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Finally, India was in a de facto war earlier this year against Pakistan (Chinese manufactured missiles landed near my ancestral home along with plenty of Turkish and Chinese drones) along with a suicide bombing in India's Tiannamen Square (the Red Fort) a couple weeks ago [12], so anything national security has a bit more credence and leeway.
[0] - https://scw-mag.com/news/apples-supply-shift-to-india-speeds...
[1] - https://www.techinasia.com/news/samsung-to-broaden-manufactu...
[2] - https://www.chosun.com/english/industry-en/2025/11/25/SLEYWT...
[3] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20251118VL205/2030-samsung-s...
[4] - https://www.ft.com/content/6ec91d4a-2f37-4a01-9132-6c7ae5b06...
[5] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
[6] - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/03/16/apple-to-offer-governme...
[7] - https://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=...
[8] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250903PD208/samsung-india-...
[9] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20241212PR200/samsung-india-...
[10] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-21/india-imp...
[11] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-21/apple-see...
[12] - https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/india-intensi...
And anyhow, major Android vendors like Samsung have aligned with the policy as well.
I think this is a bit exaggerated for effect. No one in India considers having a Linux laptop as being circumstantial evidence in case of a crime. Whereas having Tor installed would be.
DYR (deeper) and support less dodgy options like LineageOS.
How so?
> DYR (deeper)
Care to help with that?
There is a search box on the bottom of this page, just research for yourself and learn what this is about.
India chose to back off on data sovereignty [0] because it would have had a side effect of making Indian IT Offshoring less competitive plus to help make negotiating a US-India BTA easier [1].
[0] - https://verfassungsblog.de/cross-border-data-flows-and-india...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-25/us-seeks-...
So does a security backdoor in every mobile device used by said Indian offshoring staff.
That's because China has no regulation obliging them to do so.
China takes the other, more comprehensive, route to privacy invasion. Sucking up every bit of data at the router.
Other phone makers could if they wanted to do the same, but do not as an active choice, or at least somebody's choice above them.
I don't understand "just load GrapheneOS" sentiments. It only runs on extremely specific flagship devices with explicit features that allow it that are out of financial and technical reach for >99.9% of population of Earth and it still fully relies on AOSP. It's an escape hatch for mice. Or is it really not that way?
LineageOS has no such shenanigans nor has a pattern of suspicious funding.
What are these reasons?
> LineageOS has no such shenanigans nor has a pattern of suspicious funding.
What pattern of suspicious funding?
For the sake of avoiding repetition or bias, just do your own research. There is a search box at the end of the page.
Kindly use the search box on the bottom of the page.
I'm not your personal google search engine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44473694
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114784469162979608
> European authoritarians and their enablers in the media are misrepresenting GrapheneOS and even Pixel phones as if they're something for criminals. GrapheneOS is opposed to the mass surveillance police state these people want to impose on everyone.
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.
So it’s true 3,300 people were arrested for posts online. What they don’t tell you are the statistics or context. The actual law for these arrests covers EVERYTHING online. These arrests include those arrested for terrorism (if the planning/act of terror includes any online communication in the UK), threats of violence, racist abuse, hate speech and unwanted communication (including sending unsolicited sexual photos to strangers). It also includes spreading false information that could cause harm or affect an ingoing investigation.
If you look at convictions, only 137 people were actually sentenced in 2024.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DebunkThis/comments/1mmux6r/comment...
Note: this occurred in the US and not the UK but it happens here, too.
Stories like this are designed to provoke a reaction, but the truth could be far more mundane: he might be a completely unreasonable person who was genuinely stalking someone, and police might have had credible concerns. We simply don’t have the full picture.
For balance, West Yorkshire Police do have a reputation for being heavy handed. the same force that used drones during Covid to shame people walking alone on the moors.
My point is: this isn’t solid evidence of Orwellian decline. It’s difficult to draw sweeping conclusions about Britain from a single case built on incomplete information and media amplification.
Notably:
> with the situation causing him considerable stress at a point where he was also dealing with an inquest into the deaths of his parents, who had both died in a car crash in 2023
so for some reason, there was something going on about his parents' death two years later. The article also states:
> He said the complaint against him was linked to an ongoing business dispute.
My take is that someone used his pictures of him holding guns (illegal in the UK) as support for a claim that he is an armed and dangerous stalker. Whatever got flagged regarding the inquest into his parents' deaths probably added suspicion. Police acted quickly (as they should, but probably too quickly) and made mistakes, but it looks like they couldn't accept that they were being used, so they decided to continue pressing onwards with the investigation, hoping they were still right and wouldn't be on the hook for a false arrest.
Getting falsely arrested is always terrible, but the way the media spins this as some kind of witch hunt about a LinkedIn post is misleading at best.
All of these attempts to "debunk" this statistic feel like they're missing the mark. How did the UK get a point where planning terrorism and making mean comments online go into the same statistic for arrests? Does it not seem strange that the second half of that list is worthy of arrest?
> If you look at convictions, only 137 people were actually sentenced in 2024.
This, again, does not help. Being arrested isn't a casual thing. It threatens everything from your job to your reputation and your relationships, even if you aren't convicted.
The strange thing is that the UK are arresting people for abusing the telecom system, and not for the more serious crime like terrorism, death threats, harassment and sexual harassment.
In most publications: because the people reporting on these statistics can get more views and clicks that way. FUD sells. If someone online can defuse the statistics, the reporters that spread them also could've, but chose not to.
As for the second half of the list, "racist abuse, hate speech, and unwanted communication" are pretty common things to incriminate. Even the extremely liberal freedom of speech laws in the USA do not permit stalking ("unwanted communication") and racist abuse is criminalized in all kinds of cases (i.e. firing someone because of their race).
Using Carlin’s dirty words against others you dislike or quoting passages from historical books should not warrant arrests.
Edit: I believe they are now getting compensation for a 'wrongful arrest' which, sounds entirely deserved.
"He quoted an excerpt about Islam from the book The River War by Winston Churchill.
"Reportedly, a woman came out of the Guildhall and asked Mr Weston if he had the authorisation to make this speech.
"When he answered that he didn't, she told him: 'It's disgusting', and then called the police.
"Six or seven officers arrived. They talked with the people standing nearby, asking questions about what had happened.
"The police had a long discussion with Mr Weston, lasting about 40 minutes.
"At about 3pm he was arrested. They searched him, put him in a police van and took him away."
If even half of that is true, I can't fathom why someone would willingly live in that total shithole of a country.
This article says 10k https://www.zerohedge.com/political/britains-speech-gulag-ex...
More broadly it's been a huge issue for a while, tons of articles come out of the UK for people being arrested for criticizing politicians/policies. Even more dystopian is it's hard to report on, because the police might come after you for talking about it. Germany is having similar issues, it's easy to forget most of the world (including Europe) doesn't have free speech
while nobody should be arrested for speech online, here on hacker news, people are downvoted for saying something unpopular (as opposed to whatever, i don't even know what the criteria is, but maybe it should be "toxic") all the time. you are preaching to the wrong audience, not the choir.
We absolutely need to police hate speech.
> There has to be a line.
There is no line at all these days, with open hatred displayed. Fascism is on the rise across the world off the back of the hatred that's produced on social media.
> Every day 33 brits are arrested for what they say online.
They must be giving them tea and crumpets before releasing them to generate more hate online because it clearly isn't working.
> There has to be a line.
Where do you draw the line?
However, there are cases which do cross the line... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9dj1zlvxglo
And that’s where you’d be wrong - lots of us belief that speech should not be a cause for arrest except in the most extreme circumstances. Hurting someone’s feelings is not that
what is an extreme circumstance?
At least in the UK, hate speech is a crime and is punishable by law, whether people agree or disagree is irrelevant, I do believe that if it's illegal on the street it should be illegal online, obviously in the relevant jurisdiction.
Anyway, that doesn't in any way negate that this is shit for the people of India.
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.
But easy enough to tie it to iCloud region - you have to set your device and iCloud to Indian region to be able to use many of their region specific payment methods (ie UPI)
For the safety and security of children, of course.
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.
I would think very deep interests in niche or obscure topics is correlated with increased cognitive ability, not a decrease.
That's just a symptom of getting old. Young people always find stuff that baffles adults. When I was a teenager, Anime itself was like this - just being "into" anime was considered some kind of bizarre, obscure affectation by adults.
I think smartphones present real challenges (and I don't get how/why they're allowed in schools), but a lot of what you're describing is normal.
as one of said students, I would just call these hobbies!
I feel like the same could be said of an at the time adult looking at my IRC or MSN Messenger logs from when I was a teen.
The world is changing quickly, and many people may run into problems, but I'd rather let cultural solutions to these problems naturally arise. Relying on a government to impose top-down solutions on these complicated and poorly understood problems is a recipe for a disaster of unintended consequences.
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.
This will keep the data out of governments hands, while pushing the cost burden to these companies and they would be better equipped to build around these goals than the government themselves.
We all know the govt doesn't have a great track record with using Pegasus etc... Giving away control to apps that can decide your phone is stolen and lock it opens the door to any possibility including a totalitarian regime. It would be naive to believe that even if this is done with good intentions, such control could be easily mis used by opposition parties, one malicious individual etc...
If you read the Internet, you will hear that India has strict controls on KYC for SIM cards and so on. But on my last trip there I acquired one without much fuss. I'm not sure how that happened but I didn't provide any ID! I suspect that in such an environment you can't really do the thing you're suggesting.
The average mobile phone store there had an absolutely mind-blowing profusion of smartphone brands that all sound like those Amazon drop-shipped Chinese brands: Vivo, Poco, Realme, Oppo. And those are the good ones! There is a Cambrian-like explosion of brands there from various manufacturers. It's an unusual place.
EDIT: I'm going to have to reply to you here because I'm rate-limited on comments. See below in response.
Is it contradictory? I imagine saying "install this app on your phones from the factory when selling here" is a lot more achievable than coordinating what you suggested which is:
> ...build tools, reporting, support services around helping with both Scamming applications or Stolen phones etc....
But perhaps you anticipate these to both require equivalent ability? If so, I think that's the crux of the disagreement. I don't think the Indian state has the power to set up a mechanism to set a standard for tools, reporting, and support services that meet some requirements to detect scammers etc.
In fact, I think that's a really high bar. I think perhaps only highly developed nations would have any success designing such a program. I think even the smaller EU member nations would fail at it, and I don't think any of the developing nations (barring China).
Enough is enough...
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.
The real issue with 100% enforcement of law is it requires a society with differing values to not just agree on which laws exist but what just punishment is. Without leeway for differing social judgement or bifurcation.
Both are doing similar things. You have no idea what the US is doing; I have some inkling, and it is terrible.
At least India is publicly disclosing what this app does, and that the phone has this app. Do you have any idea what the US does?
Hint: that big data center in Utah, what is it for?
Another hint: the US has given many billions of dollars to US telecom companies under the guise of "rural broadband" and "rural cell service". Has the state of rural service really changed much in the last 30 years?? Why has all that money been given, then?
No one is claiming the US government is doing less terrible things than the Indian government.
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...