India, Dec. 20 -- Now that the sound and fury around the Sanchar Saathi app has died, it's time to look at the debris. What happened? What was it about? There's a history to this. Every technology controversy in India follows a predictable arc. A new system appears. A permission screen is spotted. The word "privacy" is invoked. Social media lights up. Television panels shout. And then, silence. When Sanchar Saathi hit the headlines, curiosity compelled me to download the app. I used it and read what it asked for. I also spoke to people who build privacy-first digital systems for a living. What emerged from these conversations was an unfashionable narrative. Sanchar Saathi is not opaque. While downloading, it explains what permissions it seeks and why. Its core functions are narrow and utilitarian: reporting a lost phone, blocking a stolen device, verifying mobile connections. None of this requires continuous tracking or covert data collection. The anxiety is centred almost entirely on permissions, especially location. But this is where public understanding lagged badly behind technological reality. Modern smartphone operating systems do not allow apps to behave the way people imagine they do. Location access today is granular. The user is offered choices: allow once, allow only while using the app, or deny altogether. Even when allowed, the system distinguishes between approximate and precise location. Developers do not get to override this architecture. In fact, privacy-conscious developers deliberately avoid shortcuts. City-level location can be inferred passively through IP addresses or cell towers. It feels harmless. But it is opaque and difficult for users to reverse. Which is precisely why platforms such as Apple do not allow this approach. The cleaner path is explicit Operating System-level consent. The app asks. The user decides. If the user denies, the feature simply does not work. The app cannot sneak around that choice. More importantly, denial does not trap the user. If someone wants to use the service without sharing location, they can. Manual alternatives exist. Select a city from a list. Proceed. No tracking required. The idea that Sanchar Saathi will silently track people in the background collapses the moment one understands how permissions function. "Only while using the app" means exactly that. When the app is closed, the tap is shut. So where did the controversy really come from? Someone in the Ministry of Communications decided that Sanchar Saathi should be mandatory. That single word changed everything. A voluntary public utility became a coercive instrument. And in doing so, the government ran straight into a constitutional barrier it should know better than to test. In 2017, the Supreme Court's K Puttaswamy judgment had settled a foundational principle. Privacy is a fundamental right. Any state action that intrudes upon it must satisfy three tests: legality, necessity, and proportionality. Consent matters. Choice matters. Compulsion raises the threshold dramatically. Mandatory digital services therefore sit on dangerous ground. You cannot have mandatory consent. The phrase defeats itself. This is why the backlash was inevitable. Civil society did what it always does, and should, when it senses coercion. It pushed back. What should have been a straightforward discussion about a modest public service became a morality play about mass surveillance. The nuance vanished. And once outrage exhausted itself, nobody returned to the facts. What also got lost is that India is not wrestling with these questions in isolation. Even as Sanchar Saathi was being denounced, the United States is debating a proposal that requires foreign visitors to disclose up to five years of social media history before entry. The European Union is expanding biometric and data requirements under its new entry-exit systems. Borders, across democracies, are getting thicker. This does not make the Indian government right. It restores perspective-that when coercion is attempted, it will fail. In this context, it is striking that Sanchar Saathi, a domestic utility app meant to help citizens secure their phones, asked for far less than what travellers are increasingly asked to surrender at international borders. The failure here was not technological. It was institutional. Education was needed. Instead, compulsion was attempted. Trust was demanded rather than earned. Looking back now, after the noise has settled, Sanchar Saathi stands revealed as a fairly ordinary, competently constrained app that was briefly buried under its own miscommunication. What we missed in the shouting was the more instructive story: the state still has not learnt to ask citizens....