Aadhaar and privacy-I: June 21, 2010

 

As the implementation of Aadhaar, formally known as UID, gathers steam with the project entering the prototype implementation stage, we have started hearing dissenting voices questioning the need for such an intrusive ID, incurring a lot of public money. Questions are also being asked about the constitutionality of such an exercise. While it is easy to dismiss such objections as being alarmist, it is important to go into some of the issues being raised by the critics, especially in the context of the exaggerated claims of the proponents of Aadhaar.

 

The ideas around Aadhaar being not new, it is pertinent to review the status of similar schemes in other countries. In the USA, the Social Security Number, initially conceived as a number to track individuals in social security programs, has been in use for more than 50 years. A recent proposal by some US senators to introduce biometric Social Security cards has run into stiff opposition by privacy advocates and civil-society groups. The UK government had introduced a similar biometric national ID scheme some time back. The new government plans to scrap the biometric national ID scheme within 100 days, in addition to destroying all the biometric data that was collected. The exercise was deemed wasteful, bureaucratic and intrusive.

 

In India, there have been various attempts for the creation of a national ID for a decade or more. However, the issue gathered momentum with the reinvention of the same in the form of UID, which has recently been rechristened as Aadhaar.

 

Aadhaar came into public consciousness after the UIDAI was established and the head of a corporate firm roped in as the chairman of the project. Thereafter, there were a series of seminars, analogous to marketing campaigns, advocating the positive benefits of Aadhaar. Some of the champions of UID, being influenced by notions in the IT world, looked at Aadhaar as a panacea for all ills surrounding public service delivery. The chairperson of UIDAI is reported to have even gone to the extent of saying that“The slogan of bijli, sadak, pani” is passé; ‘virtual things’ like UID number, bank account and mobile phone numbers are the in-thing.” This was almost to indicate the dawn of a new era with different priorities, making the earlier preoccupations irrelevant. Can anything be further from the truth than this?

 

One of the reasons for carrying this perception is that Aadhaar, though conceived at the government level, is currently championed by technocrats turned bureaucrats. These technocrats, who are significantly influenced by the products and processing in the IT world,    want to replicate the same in the public sphere, often ignoring the complex realities of the real world. While the making of the biometric data and its management by itself has a significant technological content, its impact goes far beyond it as it covers the ordinary citizen and the wide social sector. Focusing too much on technology, the social and privacy issues were probably overlooked at the infancy. While the UIDAI tried to address some of these concerns later through seminars, they were not comprehensive enough to gather diverse public opinion. Even though the initial mandate of UIDAI was to focus on technology associated with biometric data, the casual utterances of key representatives, without adequate awareness of privacy issues, went beyond that to advocate the wider adoption of UID in both public and private spheres.

 

Two of the major issues concerning Aadhaar revolve around the benefits of having an identity and the risks of losing privacy. Proponents of the benefits are of the opinion that a lot of social welfare programmers intended for the poor do not reach them or are denied to them because of the issues surrounding identity. By fixing the issue of identity using Aadhaar, inefficiencies and irregularities surrounding the delivery and management of social services would be resolved.

 

This is a claim disputed by most of the social scientists/activists who feel that to be a gross over-simplification of the reasons for failures of social welfare schemes.  For example, in most of the social welfare programmes where multiple agencies are involved, fixing individual identity does not necessarily stop corruption and pilferage.

 

Before commenting on the second issue surrounding privacy, it is important to understand what Aadhaar stands for. Aadhaar is a 12-digit ID which is unique to any individual in the country (It is 16 digits, but only 12 digits are relevant for identification). Behind Aadhaar is biometric data, that uniquely identifies an individual. As of now, biometric data includes digital data of the face, all ten fingerprints and iris scan. Aadhaar also includes other general details like name, age, sex etc. 

 

(The author is a Bengaluru-based technology consultant)

 

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