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

Friday, December 1, 2017

12446 - Amazon Is Asking Indians To Hand Over Their Aadhaar, India’s Controversial Biometric ID, To Track Lost Packages - Buzz Feed

The move has baffled Amazon’s Indian customers, who are already grappling with being forced to link their Aadhaar numbers to open bank accounts, get life insurance, and much more.

Posted on November 28, 2017, at 3:31 p.m.


BuzzFeed News Reporter

                       Drew Angerer / Getty Images

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the world's richest man, with a net worth of over $100 billion.

Amazon is asking customers in India — a large and crucial market — to upload copies of their Aadhaar, India’s controversial biometric ID, to its website to track down lost packages. BuzzFeed News reviewed chats between half a dozen Amazon customers in India and the company’s customer service agents in November and discovered that Amazon’s agents said not uploading a copy of Aadhaar “might result in a delay in the resolution or no resolution” of the case.

The move has baffled Amazon’s Indian customers. For months, Indians have been grappling with their government forcing them to link Aadhaar with their bank accounts and health insurance among other things. Private companies like cellphone carriers and FedEx have also demanded customers’ Aadhaar details to provide services. Many are concerned because critics say linking Aadhaar to both significant and mundane parts your life enables the state and private players to track your every move.
“[Being asked for my Aadhaar] was like being blackmailed to link [it] with my Amazon account if I wanted to get the products I had already paid for,” Shraddha Kosaria, an Amazon customer in the Indian city of Kolkata, told BuzzFeed News. “It was absurd and frustrating.”

“There are people who may not have any other form of ID besides Aadhaar,” an Amazon spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “And we really need to establish the identity of an individual when they claim missing packages.”

India’s Aadhaar program is a centralized, government-sanctioned database that links demographic information such as names, dates of birth, addresses, and mobile numbers along biometric data like fingerprints and iris scans to a unique ID number. Nearly 90% of India’s 1.3 billion people now have an Aadhaar, making it the first national ID database of this scale anywhere in the world. It’s now mandatory to have an Aadhaar to open bank accounts, file taxes, and buy a SIM card, among dozens of other things in India. But critics have slammed the program, which stores personal details of every Indian on centralized government servers, for posing a serious threat to privacy, and for enabling mass surveillance. Cryptographer and cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier told BuzzFeed News earlier this year: “When this database is hacked — and it will be — it will be because someone breaches the computer security that protects the computers actually using the data. They will go around the encryption.”

That hasn’t stopped Silicon Valley tech firms, for whom India is the largest and most important market outside the United States, from using it in their products. As BuzzFeed News exclusively reported, Airbnb and Uber, and its Softbank-backed Indian rival Ola, are exploring ways to integrate Aadhaar into their products in India. And earlier this year, Microsoft baked Aadhaar authentication right into Skype Lite, a version of the video and voice messaging app targeted at people in developing markets like India.

Gitanjali, an Amazon customer in Mumbai who did not want her last name to be published, for privacy reasons, told BuzzFeed News she contacted the retailer after it showed that a dog blanket she ordered earlier this month had been delivered, even though she didn’t actually receive it. “I got cheesed off after [Amazon customer care] asked me for a copy of my Aadhaar just to raise an investigation,” she said. “I have no idea what the purpose of asking me for my Aadhaar is!”

“I have no idea what the purpose of asking me for my Aadhaar is!”

Amazon told BuzzFeed News that the company asks for Aadhaar to authenticate the identity of customers who claim their packages are lost or missing. “Aadhaar is our preferred ID because it is the most widely held form of ID [in India] right now,” an Amazon India spokesperson said. If a customer doesn’t have Aadhaar, they said, the company would typically ask for any government-certified identification and carry out the investigation “in the best possible way, although that may, at times, have certain limitations.”

But multiple Amazon customers told BuzzFeed News they had to argue long and hard to get Amazon to take up their complaints without submitting their Aadhaar numbers first. Amazon’s interface for uploading photo ID proofs on its Indian website lists Aadhaar and PAN — an ID that is required for filing taxes in India — as the only acceptable identification.


“I was told that that my complaint cannot be registered unless I provided my Aadhaar,” Priyesh Shah, an Amazon customer from New Delhi, told BuzzFeed News. “It took an almost 45-minute conversation and multiple escalations to have the complaint registered without my Aadhaar details.”

Amazon’s use of Aadhaar does seems logical in a country where people are quickly discovering ways to defraud online sellers in a still-nascent e-commerce sector. Last month, for instance, a man in New Delhi duped Amazon by ordering expensive mobile phones 166 times and then asking for a refund after claiming that all he had received were empty boxes. According to reports, he made 52 million rupees (approximately $80,000) in two months by cheating Amazon.

“For someone like Amazon, a long purchase history will indicate a genuine customer when something like this happens,” said Kiran Jonnalagadda, cofounder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a volunteer-driven online privacy organization in Bangalore, and a vocal Aadhaar critic. “But most of their customers in India are relatively new — so it’s harder to catch fraud.” Asking for Aadhaar, therefore, makes sense, said Jonnalagadda, who still cautioned that tying yet another private service into Aadhaar is fraught.

Critics have called out private companies plugging into India’s Aadhaar database in the past. “I think it’s problematic that such an extensive ecosystem is being built around Aadhaar, whether by Indian startups or Western companies, while a comprehensive privacy law remains nonexistent in India,” Anja Kovacs, director of the Internet Democracy Project, an organization that works on issues of free speech, democracy, and social justice on the internet in India, told BuzzFeed News earlier this year. It’s a statement that Jonnalagadda echoed. “All these actors collectively help build the case for the larger surveillance machinery in India,” he said.

“Look, Amazon is nothing more than a shop to me,” said Gitanjali, the Amazon customer who bought a dog blanket. “It’s just an online storefront I buy things from. And now this storefront wants to collect my most private piece of information from me just to raise an investigation! For something I’ve already paid for! It’s crazy.”

Pranav Dixit is a tech reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Delhi.

Contact Pranav Dixit at pranav.dixit@buzzfeed.com.