Aadhaar Versus Privacy

The Supreme Court dealing with the Aadhaar petitions- of making Aadhaar Card mandatory for citizens – privacy has become central to the legal challenge facing Aadhaar, the 12-digit biometric unique identity number, raising data breach and privacy concerns. So let's understand what is Aadhaar and related issues.

Aadhaar number is a 12-digit random number issued by the UIDAI (“Authority”) to the residents of India after satisfying the verification process laid down by the Authority. Any individual, irrespective of age and gender, who is a resident of India, may enrol to obtain Aadhaar number. Person willing to enrol has to provide minimal demographic and biometric information during the enrolment process which is totally free of cost. An individual needs to enrol for Aadhaar only once and after de-duplication only one Aadhaar shall be generated, as the uniqueness is achieved through the process of demographic and biometric de-duplication.

Argument against Aadhaar 

• Aadhaar is like metadata, which reveals a lot of information about an individual.
• Aadhaar violates privacy rights of the citizens.
• Private details of citizens have been leaked on government websites and from private bodies like banks, telecom operators, insurance providers and financial organisations.
• Aadhaar gives the State a Right To Information (RTI) over the individual, in the same way that the RTI law gives the right to an individual.
• Aadhaar is prone to be misused due to user information being left in public domain.

Arguments in favour of Aadhaar

•  It is unique and robust enough to eliminate duplicates and fake identities and may be used as a basis/primary identifier to roll out several Government welfare schemes and programmes for effective service delivery thereby promoting transparency and good governance.
• Aadhaar is a strategic policy tool for social and financial inclusion, public sector delivery reforms, managing fiscal budgets, increase convenience and promote hassle-free people-centric governance.
• Aadhaar can be used as a permanent Financial Address and facilitates financial inclusion of the underprivileged and weaker sections of the society and is therefore a tool of distributive justice and equality.
• Aadhaar identity platform with its inherent features of Uniqueness, Authentication, Financial Address and e-KYC, enables the Government of India to directly reach residents of the country in delivery of various subsidies, benefits and services by using the resident’s Aadhaar number only.

Google and another social media, mobile operators, and our own voter lists have a lot more immediately damaging personal information that one has no real control over. 

On one side, we have a well organised group of anti-Aadhaar activists who can take full credit for catapulting the privacy debate on the national stage, but who have not offered a single viable alternative tool to better administer the nation's massive subsidy regime. 

The justices will hopefully focus their deliberations on where the nation should draw the line between personal privacy and national interest. 

In my view, mandating Aadhaar for all government schemes and subsidies, and allowing it as a tool to prevent money laundering and terrorism are the most logical places to draw that line. And government should quickly enact a comprehensive national data privacy law, which enshrines internationally accepted principles of privacy, must be the citizen's insurance policy to prevent mass surveillance and other excessive use of Aadhaar.