Privacy advocate notes Aadhaar records are not verified

An Indian MP has claimed that none of the records contained within the Aadhaar database have been verified, according to a report recently published by Mashable.

Independent Member of Parliament and privacy advocate, Rajeev Chandrasekhar told Mashable India: “There are two fundamental flaws in Aadhaar: it is poorly designed, and it is being poorly verified. Aadhaar isn’t foolproof, and this has resulted in fake data get into the system. This in turn opens new gateways for money launderers.”

Chandrasekhar also told Mashable that “there is no firm legislation to safeguard the privacy and rights of the billion people who have enrolled into the system. There’s little a person whose Aadhaar data has been compromised could do.”

“Citizens who have voluntarily given their data to Aadhaar authority, as of result of this, are at risk,” he added.

Aadhaar is the 12-digit unique identification number issued by the Indian government to every individual resident of India. The Aadhaar project aims to provide a single, unique identifier which captures all the demographic and biometric details of every Indian resident. Currently, Aadhaar has issued over 900 million Aadhaar numbers. Over one billion people have now been enrolled for the project, which initially was only used for the provision of social services. The Indian government’s next intention is to extend Aadhaar to the majority of consumer financial transactions.

Recently, BiometricUpdate.com reported however that the Indian public is concerned about new fingerprint payment schemes that leverage Aadhaar, and that the prospect of using fingerprint authentication for everyday payments has raised concerns at the Centre for Internet and Society.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the centre, told Mashable: “Aadhaar is remote, covert, and non-consensual.” He also added that Aadhaar doesn’t use basic principles of cryptography, and that much of its security is not known.

Other prominent critics, who include lawyer Rahul Narayan, an advocate who has argued in front of the Supreme Court of India, also told Mashable that “there’s no concrete regulation in place” that governs Aahaar.

Article Topics

Aadhaar  |  biometrics  |  data storage  |  privacy