In 2009, I became extremely concerned with the concept of Unique Identity for various reasons. Connected with many like minded highly educated people who were all concerned.
On 18th May 2010, I started this Blog to capture anything and everything I came across on the topic. This blog with its million hits is a testament to my concerns about loss of privacy and fear of the ID being misused and possible Criminal activities it could lead to.
In 2017 the Supreme Court of India gave its verdict after one of the longest hearings on any issue. I did my bit and appealed to the Supreme Court Judges too through an On Line Petition.
In 2019 the Aadhaar Legislation has been revised and passed by the two houses of the Parliament of India making it Legal. I am no Legal Eagle so my Opinion carries no weight except with people opposed to the very concept.
In 2019, this Blog now just captures on a Daily Basis list of Articles Published on anything to do with Aadhaar as obtained from Daily Google Searches and nothing more. Cannot burn the midnight candle any longer.
"In Matters of Conscience, the Law of Majority has no place"- Mahatma Gandhi
Ram Krishnaswamy
Sydney, Australia.

Aadhaar

The UIDAI has taken two successive governments in India and the entire world for a ride. It identifies nothing. It is not unique. The entire UID data has never been verified and audited. The UID cannot be used for governance, financial databases or anything. It’s use is the biggest threat to national security since independence. – Anupam Saraph 2018

When I opposed Aadhaar in 2010 , I was called a BJP stooge. In 2016 I am still opposing Aadhaar for the same reasons and I am told I am a Congress die hard. No one wants to see why I oppose Aadhaar as it is too difficult. Plus Aadhaar is FREE so why not get one ? Ram Krishnaswamy

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.-Mahatma Gandhi

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.Mahatma Gandhi

“The invasion of privacy is of no consequence because privacy is not a fundamental right and has no meaning under Article 21. The right to privacy is not a guaranteed under the constitution, because privacy is not a fundamental right.” Article 21 of the Indian constitution refers to the right to life and liberty -Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi

“There is merit in the complaints. You are unwittingly allowing snooping, harassment and commercial exploitation. The information about an individual obtained by the UIDAI while issuing an Aadhaar card shall not be used for any other purpose, save as above, except as may be directed by a court for the purpose of criminal investigation.”-A three judge bench headed by Justice J Chelameswar said in an interim order.

Legal scholar Usha Ramanathan describes UID as an inverse of sunshine laws like the Right to Information. While the RTI makes the state transparent to the citizen, the UID does the inverse: it makes the citizen transparent to the state, she says.

Good idea gone bad
I have written earlier that UID/Aadhaar was a poorly designed, unreliable and expensive solution to the really good idea of providing national identification for over a billion Indians. My petition contends that UID in its current form violates the right to privacy of a citizen, guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. This is because sensitive biometric and demographic information of citizens are with enrolment agencies, registrars and sub-registrars who have no legal liability for any misuse of this data. This petition has opened up the larger discussion on privacy rights for Indians. The current Article 21 interpretation by the Supreme Court was done decades ago, before the advent of internet and today’s technology and all the new privacy challenges that have arisen as a consequence.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, MP Rajya Sabha

“What is Aadhaar? There is enormous confusion. That Aadhaar will identify people who are entitled for subsidy. No. Aadhaar doesn’t determine who is eligible and who isn’t,” Jairam Ramesh

But Aadhaar has been mythologised during the previous government by its creators into some technology super force that will transform governance in a miraculous manner. I even read an article recently that compared Aadhaar to some revolution and quoted a 1930s historian, Will Durant.Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Rajya Sabha MP

“I know you will say that it is not mandatory. But, it is compulsorily mandatorily voluntary,” Jairam Ramesh, Rajya Saba April 2017.

August 24, 2017: The nine-judge Constitution Bench rules that right to privacy is “intrinsic to life and liberty”and is inherently protected under the various fundamental freedoms enshrined under Part III of the Indian Constitution

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the World; indeed it's the only thing that ever has"

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” -Edward Snowden

In the Supreme Court, Meenakshi Arora, one of the senior counsel in the case, compared it to living under a general, perpetual, nation-wide criminal warrant.

Had never thought of it that way, but living in the Aadhaar universe is like living in a prison. All of us are treated like criminals with barely any rights or recourse and gatekeepers have absolute power on you and your life.

Announcing the launch of the # BreakAadhaarChainscampaign, culminating with events in multiple cities on 12th Jan. This is the last opportunity to make your voice heard before the Supreme Court hearings start on 17th Jan 2018. In collaboration with @no2uidand@rozi_roti.

UIDAI's security seems to be founded on four time tested pillars of security idiocy

1) Denial

2) Issue fiats and point finger

3) Shoot messenger

4) Bury head in sand.

God Save India

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

11826 - We need a trust model for Aadhaar - Live Mint


The model should match ordinary people’s expectations in terms of factors such as identity, authentication, service-level agreements and, of course, privacy


As Aadhaar data gets linked with banking apps, credit cards, mobile connections and other services, there are transactional data logs associated with authentication.

Privacy is a complex topic by any stretch of imagination—be it in a modern Western democracy with an elevated, even entitled sense of individual privacy or an emerging economy like India that is only beginning to grapple with the issues associated with it. So when any overarching technology initiative such as Aadhaar—which deals with the biometric authentication data of over a billion people—begins to come into full force through integration with a lot of services, data privacy concerns among common folk are repeatedly bound to be raised.

A “trust model” can help by directly addressing those concerns. The model should match ordinary people’s expectations in terms of factors such as identity, authentication, service-level agreements and, of course, privacy. The model should also encompass how those factors are dealt with from a people, process and technology perspective. So how what kind of a trust model can we build in the Indian context?

Such a model, I believe, should be based on four substantive principles. 
One, it should allow an own your own data (OYOD) consent process. 

Two, it should keep the data confidential. 

Three, there should be adequate contractual arrangements among the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI—which issues Aadhaar) as the hub and the registrars/enrolment centres in the public and private sector as spokes. 

And four, it should have robust, end-to-end security, connectivity and access measures among the hub and spokes.

The Aadhaar technology and architecture document (2014) advocated a “minimalistic approach to data” and a “federated model” with one-way linkage. In simple terms, existing identities such as bank account numbers and permanent account numbers were not to be originally captured within Aadhaar. Instead, such identities were to be linked “one-way” to Aadhaar. This would imply precluding the mandatory linking of other non-DBT stuff (DBT, or direct benefit transfer, allows the government to directly transfer money to beneficiary accounts under various subsidy schemes). The exceptions included attendance systems in government institutions (used in Jharkhand, for instance) and opening basic savings deposit (BSBD) accounts under the Prime Minister’s Jan Dhan Yojana, which were DBT-related linkages. Other than that, the Aadhaar linkages should be made voluntary and consensual in nature—such as regular bank accounts, income tax, air/train travel, exam results, medical and employment records and registration of marriage.

Another point is that the Aadhaar Act envisaged UIDAI as both a “custodian” of Aadhaar data and the “measure of last resort” in an emergency response situation for data breaches. This makes UIDAI the data custodian as well as its own regulator. Indeed, in case of a data breach, it is the UIDAI—and not the citizens whose data is breached—that gets notified. The authority then decides how best to proceed in the case. Here, it is pertinent to note that the citizen has little legal recourse, as Section 47 of the Aadhaar Act states that any criminal complaint can only be filed by the UIDAI. Furthermore, the Aadhaar Act grants the UIDAI complete immunity from liability and prosecution of any kind. All this makes the “consent” part of the trust model absent or incomplete.

As Aadhaar data gets linked with banking apps, credit cards, mobile connections and other services, there are transactional data logs associated with authentication. Though passive in nature by way of simple “yes/no” mode of authentication, these transactions nonetheless capture “personal data” as they pertain to one’s day-to-day activity and behaviour. So this “electronic footprint” of transactional data—which comprises people’s lifestyle and consumption patterns—needs to be protected in addition to just the biometric Aadhaar data.
While the UIDAI’s stance is that the linkage to Aadhaar is “one-way”, even the uni-directional linkage cannot prevent encroachment on a person’s privacy by having artificial intelligence (AI) bots run through the interconnected web of databases where all those transactions are captured. Right from its Strategy Overview (2010), the Aadhaar project revealed a preference for building revenue models around data generated during authentication by private entities. While there is nothing wrong with building such an open tech platform and an ecosystem for young Indians to build innovative apps, the data itself—considered the new oil by many—must be safeguarded by adopting “defence in depth” safety principles, to borrow a concept from the nuclear energy business.

As a thumb rule, the more the number of endpoints accessing a database, and the more the methods in which the data can be accessed, the higher is the security risk in the overall system. And when DBT and other services are made available to individual or even entities such as hospitals, telecom companies, e-governance agencies, insurance firms and airports via open application programming interfaces (APIs) and authentication keys—including by start-up portals and mobile apps to provide e-KYC services—there is a cause for concern.
Such concerns are not without precedent. Recently in Jharkhand, unmasked demographic details were revealed—names, addresses, Aadhaar numbers and bank account details of the beneficiaries of Jharkhand’s old age pension scheme of more than a million citizens. Other concerns relate to illegal storage of Aadhaar biometrics at some service providers’ end, potentially for identity theft and improper access or misuse of transactional authentication logs by fraudsters. Finally, if there is a cyber attack on the encrypted biometric data itself and its concomitant demographic profile (no such evidence of that to date, though it is not unheard of), then one must be reminded that unlike the usual passwords, the biometrics cannot be “reset” or “re-seeded”. And this would constitute an irreversible and immutable loss of privacy to individuals.

In conclusion, even as the Supreme Court has proposed a three-tiered privacy doctrine—what I would term as Indian ingenuity of trying to please all but satisfying none—three aspects should be addressed if indeed this is the path that will be taken. 

One, within each tier, data should also be “ring-fenced” to disallow conjoint use, that is, opt-out should be the default option. For instance, in the government’s Project Insight, which intends to use data from social media to cross-tabulate citizens, the personal data of citizens ought to be kept away from prying. 

Two, what sub-elements fall in each tier, and how to distinguish them, could be a cause for litigation, appeal and public confusion. So those sub-elements should be defined as unambiguously as possible. And third, an OYOD-based consent process should be included to allow all individuals to view or “audit” their own data or decide what part of data to share, with whom and for what purpose.

Probir Roy is co-founder of PayMate (India) Pvt. Ltd, an early mover in the fintech space.

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