The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has stuck to its proposal for a sunset date to make GPS mandatory in all handsets, reports Techradar. According to the authority, this will help it find out the exact location of a caller in case of an emergency. Note that this proposal was rejected by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), based on the fact that many people still use feature phones which usually do not support GPS, and citing that the impact of such a decision must be studied before taking a call. In the same proposal, TRAI had recommended 112 to be used as a single emergency number, an idea the DoT approved. Medianama’s take: While we understand that TRAI might want better location data when an emergency number is called, we feel the mandate to push GPS on all devices is a little overreaching. This move, if gone through with, will raise the cost of manufacturing feature phones (which can’t really do things like display a map anyway), driving up the cost for the end user. There are even really low cost Android phones that come without GPS, enabling the really underprivileged to also get online. We understand that technologies like GPS will eventually become standard, but meanwhile pushing it in such an unhealthy way can only be detrimental to mobile and mobile internet adoption. The second issue is that of user privacy, which the Indian government really, really doesn’t take seriously. A sanction to implement GPS on all phones…
