So a pretty transparent way to tie IMEI to someone's identity and track their location under the guise of "finding lost phones" and "checking your phone's authenticity"
I think this is to crack down on sharing a SIM card which is registered to someone else. It ties identity + location + aggregates all SIMs registered to someone with their current location.
Not to mention they can probably payload anything into the app whenever they want.
That's already the case for most places around the world, unfortunately. Though, this does make the link rather obvious, which is a bit more surprising. Normally shady tracking just happens through a combination of data brokers and leaked databases.
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.
This is great first hand feedback. I like these kinds of HN posts.
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?
It partially automates the process of lodging a complaint against a call, SMS, or WhatsApp communication.
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.
Another great post. Thank you. It is great to hear that haven't suffered any monetary loss and you are getting fewer scam calls.
I have a "dumb" follow-up question: (Honestly, I don't understand the pushback here on HN against this app.) Do you feel it is invasive or acts as gov't surveillance on your mobile phone? What you describe sounds pretty good to me.
As of now, it's completely passive. It's just a wrapper around their website with some features which reduce friction.
For example, we have a DND (Do Not Disturb) system which is opt-in. Most people don't know about this. Originally signing up required a new user to send a series of text messages to register (opt-in) and select what kind of ads (spam) they would tolerate. For example you could say block everything except bank offers.
This app walks you through the process.
I keep a close watch on permissions etc which apps ask for. This app doesn't really want access to anything unusual.
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]
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]
India has not been antagonistic or ambivalent in its recent past, until a Nobel Peace Prize aspirant in the WH decided to take a machete to relations that both countries had been building for the last 25 years, with largely bipartisan support in both countries. Even the current Indian govt is quite pro US until the aspirant tanked that relationship.
And yes, there will be times India doesn't agree with the US, and that's normal. It's seeking to be a partner, not a vassal state.
> India has not been antagonistic or ambivalent in its recent past...
Yep, but stuff can change rapidly.
From 1972-1992 it was China that used to be the pillar of the America's Asia strategy as a bulwark against the USSR, with US soldiers posted in Xinjiang monitoring the USSR [0], US government sponsored tech transfers and scientific collaboration [1], American support for Chinese military modernization [2][3], and expanded economic cooperation [4].
Yet by the late 2000s, that relation degraded into a competitive relationship that has become the cold war that it is today because by the 1990s US and Chinese ambitions became misaligned - especially following US sanctions due to the Tienanmen Massacre [5], Clinton's pivot to newly democratic Taiwan [6], and Chinese attempts at industrial espionage [7].
The US and India are not fully aligned because neither American nor Indian policymakers have significant exposure to either and remain extremely insular (eg. Stanford and Penn are the only American universities with a competitive program on Contemporary Indian politics and foreign policy, and there are only at most 20 American scholars on contemporary Indian policy - it was the same during my time in the early 2010s with regards to China, except instead of Penn it was Harvard), and that's why the US-India relationship has been in a tailspin for the past couple years. The US-India relationship are now in the equivalent position as that of the US and China in the late 1990s to early 2000s era, and are largely predicated on mutual competition against China.
Snafus like the RAW-backed Nijjar assassination as well as the US's support for Asim Munir highlights how the relationship is starting to fray. If alignment is not found within the next few years, the relationship will become competitive and potentially antagonistic in nature because India will start feeling that the US is encircling India just like China, and the US will start viewing India as "rocking the boat".
