Indian Government To Track Locations of All Cell Phone Users

asto21 writes with this excerpt from The Indian Express: "As per amendments made to operators' licences, beginning May 31, operators would have to provide the Department of Telecommunications real-time details of users' locations in latitudes and longitudes. Documents obtained by The Indian Express show that details shall initially be provided for mobile numbers specified by the government. Within three years, service providers will have to provide information on locations of all users. The information will have some margin of error at first. But by 2013, at least 60 per cent of the calls in urban areas would have to be accurately tracked when made 100 metres away from the nearest cell tower. By 2014, the government will seek to increase the proportion to 75 per cent in cities and 50 per cent in suburban and rural areas."

What will happen?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Seems pretty obvious to me that the biggest result will be that people who are actual criminals will take pains to either turn off their cell phones, use stolen phones or just go without any time they are doing something criminal.

Meanwhile all the regular people are now even more at risk of the government or anyone else with access to this information like ex-boyfriends at the telco using this information against them.

Governments with Control Issues

[justinlw]

Really, why is it that governments feel they must track our every movement, our every interaction? The answer is that governments - no matter how well they start off - all eventually end up seeking to fully control the lives of their citizens: it seems to be some sort of unavoidable emergent property of large aggregations of people. The idea of a citizen having some degree of personal sovereignty just falls by the wayside and everybody just gets swept up in the imperatives of the government. This may seem innocuous - or even benign to the naive - but the long term result is that it is a seeking of control for the sake of having control. Being traced like this can hardly be considered to be in the best interests of individual people.

Who's this for?

[Compaqt]

For "normal" people, obviously:

There are 1,170,938,000 people in India [google.com].

The Taj attacks were carried out by 10 men [wikipedia.org].

Meaning 99.9999991% of the people to be affected by this are NOT the poster children/excuse for this kind of tracking.

It seems all the governments of the world are in a race to be the most onerous and most oppressive. They learn from each other, and so must we (normal peeps).