OPINION | ‘Fraud-stack’ can’t be defeated by front-door surveillance

Not during emergencies.

Not with warrants.

Always.

A heavy-handed approach is counterproductive

The logic is seductive in its simplicity. Fraudsters are elusive; precise tracking might help corner them. But desperation is a poor designer of public policy and always produces ill-effects even as a first-order effect.

For the truth is this: India’s fraud crisis is grave, but redesigning every smartphone into a surveillance device is not a remedy. It is an over-correction so sweeping that it risks killing the very foundations of a society in the digital era.

An archaic enforcement mechanism

Fraudsters do not thrive because citizens can switch off their GPS; they thrive because the enforcement ecosystem meant to catch them is running on archaic machinery. Investigative pipelines still move at analogue speed in a digital age, struggling to keep pace with criminals who operate with agility and anonymity. Inter-agency coordination is uneven, often leaving vital intelligence stranded in silos rather than stitched into actionable insight.

An ecosystem that facilitates frauds

Compounding this are deeper structural weaknesses. Telecom distribution networks continue to harbour pockets of corruption that allow fraudulent SIMs and compromised identities to slip through the cracks. Bank officials often collude to open bank accounts to facilitate money laundering. Cyber-policing capacity varies dramatically across states, creating uneven lines of defence, while international cooperation against cross-border fraud syndicates remains sluggish and bureaucratically heavy.

Faced with this messy, multi-layered reality, it is tempting for the state to reach for a shortcut: if the plumbing is so broken that sewage floods often, why not re-engineer the whole house and the people who live in it? The problems that cripple fraud enforcement lie within systems and institutions, not in the privacy settings of ordinary citizens.

A nation tracked by default

Mandating always-on A-GPS tracking would mark a radical departure from India’s surveillance norms. Today, the state must request location data through telecom providers, however imperfectly. Under the proposed regime, the state would not request: it would receive, silently, perpetually. This shifts the presumption at the heart of the Republic: from targeted scrutiny of suspects to ambient tracking of everyone.

Supporters of this idea often lean on a familiar refrain: “law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear.” But freedom to be oneself is not protected by innocence; it is protected by the ability not to be watched without cause. A country that normalises round-the-clock tracking of everyone to fight cybercrime will unleash so much distrust among people that it will destroy the already fragile societal trust within communities. And what comes after is a well-known and worn lesson of history – a transition of a society of demos into that of helots.

Danger of mission creep

Mass surveillance may begin as an anti-fraud tool, but it rarely stays that way. What makes the proposal more perplexing is its timing. India is simultaneously positioning itself as a global force in ethical digital governance: championing data localisation, exporting India Stack, and enacting privacy legislation, at least in aspiration.

How then does a nation present itself as a guardian of user data on the world stage, while considering a policy that would harvest the clearest, most intimate data of all—one’s physical movements without pause or consent? Even China, despite its expansive surveillance apparatus, does not publicly mandate always-on, hardware-level location tracking on every smartphone. To adopt it would make India a global outlier—for reasons that diminish rather than enhance its digital credibility.

Fix the system, not the citizen

A credible response to fraud demands strengthening the state’s capabilities and not simultaneously shrinking citizens’ rights to non-existence. That means building modern cyber-forensics units, enabling real-time fraud-intelligence sharing between banks, fintechs and telecom companies, and re-imagining KYC given its now well-documented failures when stress-tested by fraudsters at scale. It also requires cleansing corruption within telecom and banking distribution chains, where weak points often become entry gates for fraudulent identities.

Equally essential is judicially-monitored access to sensitive data—oversight that ensures the state’s powers are targeted, proportionate and accountable. And across states, cyber-policing capacity must become more uniform; enforcement cannot depend on geography or administrative luck. Inter-state coordination must work without collapsing under bureaucratic weight at precisely the moments when speed matters most.

These reforms are unglamorous. They demand patience, investment and transparency –– qualities harder to cultivate than passing a sweeping secret directive. But rights-eroding shortcuts are the last refuge of systems unwilling to repair themselves, and no democracy should choose the dopamine of more unaccountable power over constitutional discipline.

India’s digital future must not be built on fear —fear of bad press, fear of rising fraud numbers, fear of public outrage. Policies under pressure tend to expand state power faster than they strengthen public trust. The government recently withdrew the mandatory app-installation order after public alarm. That was a reminder that democratic course correction is still possible. It is needed again.

Fraud demands tough solutions. But turning every citizen into a traceable coordinate is surrendering to the illusion that safety can be purchased by trading away liberty. India’s challenge is not to choose between privacy and security. It is to build a state competent enough not to pit one against the other.

A nation state does not stay as one entity simply by fear and coercion of its citizenry. It stays as one because its citizens have the freedom to walk, travel, and simply exist without the state watching over every step. Freedom is the quiet space in which a society breathes. And it must not be switched off by switching on one mandatory GPS tracking system at a time.

Mandatory phone tracking won’t stop fraud. It will only end privacy.

After all, we did not rebel against the British Raj to escape becoming Macaulay-Putras to gain our freedom only to become Orwell-Putras 75 years later.

(Srinath Sridharan & Anand Venkatanarayanan are, respectively, a corporate advisor and author of Family and Dhanda; and co-founder and CTO, DeepStrat.)

Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.