The French parliament earlier passedA bill, which will allow police to monitor criminal suspects remotely through the camera, microphone and GPS positioning functions on mobile phones or other devices.
The bill has been preliminarily approved, but it still needs to go through subsequent legislation to become a formal law.
If law enforcement officers are allowed to monitor specific targets through this law, they must meet several conditions, including that the target must have committed a serious crime, the monitoring period is limited to a maximum of six months, and the target must have committed a crime punishable by at least five years in prison if tracked by GPS.
On the other hand, this law also explicitly prohibits journalists, lawyers or other sensitive professions from using this law to regulate specific targets, so that this bill is only used for law enforcement to avoid abuse.
However, there are still many opinions that the remote connection means behind this law usually exploit security vulnerabilities in mobile phones or devices, which means that law enforcement officers will only use these vulnerabilities to enforce the law, but this may cause more device vulnerabilities to be abused. In addition, it is believed that this law may be used to control more people who oppose or are unfavorable to government agencies, and it is bound to become a bill that is abused.
