Centre for Internet and Society

India's biometric database crosses billion-member mark

praskrishna — 2016-04-07T02:54:08Z

India's biometric database notched up one billion members on Monday, as the government sought to allay concerns about privacy breaches in the world's biggest such scheme.

The news by AFP was published by Daily Mail, UK on April 4, 2016. Sunil Abraham gave inputs.

The database was set up seven years ago to streamline benefit payments to millions of poor people as well as to cut fraud and wastage. Under the scheme, called Aadhaar, almost 93 percent of India's adult population have now registered their fingerprints and iris signatures and been given a biometric ID, according to the government.

IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad hailed it as "an instrument of good governance" at a ceremony in New Delhi marking the crossing of the one-billion member mark.

Prasad said the initiative, inherited from the previous left-leaning Congress government, had enabled millions to receive cash benefits directly rather than dealing with middlemen.

He said the government had saved 150 billion rupees ($2.27 billion) on its gas subsidy scheme alone -- by paying cash directly to biometric card holders instead of providing cylinders at subsidised rates.

He also said all adequate safeguards were in place to ensure the personal details of card holders could not be stolen or misused by authorities given access to the database.

"We have taken all measures to ensure privacy. The data will not be shared with anyone except in cases of national security," Prasad said.

His comments come after parliament passed legislation last month giving government agencies access to the database in the interests of national security.

It was passed using a loophole to circumvent the opposition in parliament, where the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lacks a majority in the upper house.

The way it was passed, as well as the legislation itself, raised concerns about government agencies accessing private citizens' details.

Internet experts have also raised fears about the safety of such a massive database, including hacking and theft of details.

"It was as if Indian lawmakers wrote an open letter to criminals and foreign states saying, 'we are going to collect data to non-consensually identify all Indians and we are going to store it in a central repository. Come and get it!'," Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, wrote in India's Frontline news magazine.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/daily-mail-april-4-2016-afp-india-biometric-database-crosses-billion-member-mark

India's billion-member biometric database raises privacy fears

praskrishna — 2016-03-17T15:25:45Z

India's parliament is set to pass legislation that gives federal agencies access to the world's biggest biometric database in the interests of national security, raising fears the privacy of a billion people could be compromised.

The article by Sanjeev Miglani and Manoj Kumar was published by Reuters on March 16, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

The move comes as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) cracks down on student protests and pushes a Hindu nationalist agenda in state elections, steps that some say erode India's traditions of tolerance and free speech.

It could also usher in surveillance far more intrusive than the U.S. telephone and Internet spying revealed by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, some privacy advocates said.

The Aadhaar database scheme, started seven years ago, was set up to streamline payment of benefits and cut down on massive wastage and fraud, and already nearly a billion people have registered their finger prints and iris signatures.

Now the BJP, which inherited the scheme, wants to pass new provisions including those on national security, using a loophole to bypass the opposition in parliament.

"It has been showcased as a tool exclusively meant for disbursement of subsidies and we do not realize that it can also be used for mass surveillance," said Tathagata Satpathy, a lawmaker from the eastern state of Odisha.

"Can the government ... assure us that this Aadhaar card and the data that will be collected under it – biometric, biological, iris scan, finger print, everything put together – will not be misused as has been done by the NSA in the U.S.?"

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has defended the legislation in parliament, saying Aadhaar saved the government an estimated 150 billion rupees ($2.2 billion) in the 2014-15 financial year alone.

A finance ministry spokesman added that the government had taken steps to ensure citizens' privacy would be respected and the authority to access data was exercised only in rare cases.

According to another government official, the new law is in fact more limited in scope than the decades-old Indian Telegraph Act, which permits national security agencies and tax authorities to intercept telephone conversations of individuals in the interest of public safety.

"POLICE STATE"

Those assurances have not satisfied political opponents and people from religious minorities, including India's sizeable Muslim community, who say the database could be used as a tool to silence them.

"We are midwifing a police state," said Asaduddin Owaisi, an opposition MP.

Raman Jit Singh Chima, global policy director at Access, an international digital rights organization, said the proposed Indian law lacked the transparency and oversight safeguards found in Europe or the United States, which last year reformed its bulk telephone surveillance program.

He pointed to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which must approve many surveillance requests made by intelligence agencies, and European data protection authorities as oversight mechanisms not present in the Indian proposal.

The Indian government brought the Aadhaar legislation to the upper house of parliament on Wednesday in a bid to secure passage before lawmakers go into recess.

To get around its lack of a majority there, the BJP is presenting it as a financial bill, which the upper chamber cannot reject. It can return it to the lower house, where the ruling party has a majority.

In its assessment of the measure, New Delhi-based PRS Legislative Research said law enforcement agencies could use someone's Aadhaar number as a link across various datasets such as telephone and air travel records.

That would allow them to recognize patterns of behavior and detect potential illegal activities.

But it could also lead to harassment of individuals who are identified incorrectly as potential security threats, PRS said.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, said Aadhaar created a central repository of biometrics for almost every citizen of the world's most populous democracy that could be compromised.

"Maintaining a central database is akin to getting the keys of every house in Delhi and storing them at a central police station," he said.

"It is very easy to capture iris data of any individual with the use of next generation cameras. Imagine a situation where the police is secretly capturing the iris data of protesters and then identifying them through their biometric records.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/reuters-march-16-2016-sanjeev-miglani-and-manoj-kumar-indias-billion-member-biometric-database-raises-privacy-fears

India's Aadhaar with biometric details of its billion citizens is making experts uncomfortable

praskrishna — 2017-02-14T14:57:33Z

"Indians in general have yet to understand the meaning and essence of privacy," says Member of Parliament, Tathagata Satpathy.

The blog post was published by Mashable India on February 14, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

But on Feb. 3, privacy was the hot topic of debate among many in India, thanks to a tweet that showed random people being identified on the street via Aadhaar, India's ubiquitous database that has biometric information of more than a billion Indians.

That's how India Stack, the infrastructure built by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), welcomed OnGrid, a privately owned company that is going to tap on the world's largest biometrics system, conjuring images of Minority Report style surveillance.

But how did India get here?

Aadhaar's foundation

Not long ago, there were more people in India without a birth or school certificate than those with one (PDF). They had no means to prove their identity. This also contributed to what is more popularly known as “leakage” in the government subsidy fundings. The funds weren’t reaching the right people, in some instances, and much of it was being siphoned off by middlemen.

Nearly a decade ago, the government began scrambling for ways to tackle these issues. Could technology come to the rescue? The government dialled techies, people like Nandan Nilekani, a founder of India's mammoth IT firm Infosys, for help.

In 2008, they formulated Aadhaar, an audacious project "destined" to change the prospects of Indians. It was similar to Social Security number that US residents are assigned, but its implications were further reaching.

At the time, the government said it will primarily use this optional program to help the poor who are in need of services such as grocery and other household items at subsidized rates.

Eight years later, Aadhar, which stores identity information such as a photo, name, address, fingerprints and iris scans of its citizens and also assigns them with a unique 12-digit number, has become the world's largest biometrics based identity system.

According to the Indian government, over 1.11 billion people of the country's roughly 1.3 billion citizens have enrolled themselves in the biometrics system. About 99 percent of all adults in India have an Aadhaar card, it said last month.

Today, the significance of Aadhaar, which on paper remains an optional program, is undeniable in the country. The government says Aadhaar has already saved it as much as $5 billion.

But that's not it.

There's a bit of Aadhaar in everyone's life

Aadhaar (Hindi for foundation) has long moved beyond helping the poor. The UPI (Unified Payment Interface), another project by the Indian government that uses Aadhaar, is helping the country's much unbanked population to avail financial services for the first time. Nilekani calls it a "WhatsApp moment" in the Indian financial sector.

In December last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched BHIM, a UPI-based payments app that aims to get millions of Indians to do online money transactions for the first time, irrespective of which bank they had their accounts with. With BHIM, transferring money is as simple as sending a text message. People can also scan QR codes and pay merchants for their purchases.

"This app is destined to replace all cash transactions," Modi said at the launch event. "BHIM app will revolutionize India and force people worldwide to take notice," he added.

The next phase, called Aadhaar Enabled Payments System will do away with smartphones. People will be able to make payments by swiping their finger on special terminals equipped with fingerprint sensors rather than swiping cards.

Last year, the government said people could store their driver license documents in an app called DigiLocker, should they want to be relieved from the burden of carrying paper documents. DigiLocker is a digital cloud service that any citizen in India can avail using their Aadhaar information.

The government also plans to hand out "health cards" to senior citizens, mapped to their Aadhaar number, which will store their medical records, which doctors will be able to access.

“Aadhaar is an instrument for good governance. Aadhaar is the mode to reach the poor without the middlemen,” Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s IT minister said in a press conference last year.

But despite all the ways Aadhaar is making meaningful impact in millions of lives, some people are very skeptical about it. And for them, the scale at which Aadhaar operates now is only making things worse.

A security nightmare

There have been multiple reports suggesting bogus and fake entries in Aadhaar database. Instances of animals such as dogs and cows having their own Aadhaar identification numbers have been widely reported. In one instance, even Hindu god Hanuman was found to have an Aadhaar card.

The problem, it appears, is Aadhaar database has never been verified or audited, according to multiple security experts, privacy advocates, lawyers, and politicians who spoke to Mashable India this month.

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

Another issue with Aadhaar is, Chandrasekhar explains, 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.

Rahul Narayan, a lawyer who is counselling several petitioners challenging the Aadhaar project, echoed similar sentiments. “There’s no concrete regulation in place,” he told Mashable India. “The scope for abuses in Aadhaar is very vast,” he added.

But regulation — or its lack thereof — is only one of the many challenges, experts say. Sunil Abraham, the executive director of Bangalore-based research organisation the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), says the security concerns around Aadhaar are alarming.

“Aadhaar is remote, covert, and non-consensual,” he told Mashable India, adding the existence of a central database of any kind, but especially in the context of the Aadhaar, and at the scale it is working is appalling.

Abraham said fingerprint and iris data of a person can be stolen with little effort — a “gummy bear” which sells for a few cents, can store one’s fingerprint, while a high resolution camera can capture one’s iris data.

Aadhaar doesn’t use basic principles of cryptography, and much of its security is not known.

Aadhaar is also irrevocable, which strands a person, whose data has been compromised, with no choice but to get on with life, Abraham said, adding that these vulnerabilities could have been averted had the government chosen smart cards instead of biometrics.

On top of this, he added, that Aadhaar doesn’t use basic principles of cryptography, and much of the security defences it uses are not known.

Had the government open sourced Aadhaar code to the public (a common practice in the tech community), security analysts could have evaluated the strengths of Aadhaar. But this too isn’t happening.

At CIS, Sunil and his colleagues have written over half-a-dozen open letters to the UIDAI (the authority that governs Aadhaar project) raising questions and pointing holes in the system. But much of their feedback has not returned any response, Abraham told Mashable India.

India Stack: A goldmine for everyone

As part of its push to make Aadhaar more useful, the UIDAI created what is called India Stack, an infrastructure through which government bodies as well as private entities could leverage Aadhaar's database of individual identities. This is what sparked the initial debate about privacy when India Stack tweeted the controversial photo.

Speaking to Mashable India, Piyush Peshwani, a founder of OnGrid, however dismissed the concerns, clarifying that the picture was for representation purposes only. He said OnGrid is building a trust platform, through which it aims to make it easier for recruiters to do background check on their potential employees after getting their consent.

India Stack and OnGrid have since taken down the picture from their Twitter accounts. "OnGrid, much like other 200 companies working with UIDAI, can only retrieve information of users after receiving their prior consent," he said.

The lack of information from the UIDAI and India Stack is becoming a real challenge for citizens, many feel. There also appears to be a conflict of interest between the privately held companies and those who helped design the framework of Aadhaar.

As Rohin Dharmakumar, a Bangalore-based journalist pointed out, Peshwani was part of the core team member of Aadhaar project. A lawyer, who requested to be not identified, told Mashable India that there is a chance that these people could be familiar with Aadhaar’s roadmap and use the information for business advantage, to say the least.

Most people Mashable India spoke to are questioning the way these third-party companies are handling Aadhaar data. There is no regulation in place to prevent these companies from storing people’s data or even creating a parallel database of their own — a view echoed by Abraham, Narayan, and Chandrasekhar.

Not mandatory only on paper

But for many, the biggest concern with Aadhaar remains just how aggressively it is being implemented into various systems. For instance, in the past one month alone, students in most Indians states who want to apply for NEET, a national level medical entrance test, were told by the education board CBSE that they will have to provide their Aadhaar number.

A few months ago, Aadhaar was also made mandatory for students who wanted to appear in JEE, an all India common engineering entrance examination conducted for admission to various engineering colleges in the country.

The apex Supreme Court of India recently asked the central government to register the phone number of all mobile subscribers in India (there are about one billion of those in India) to their respective Aadhaar cards. Telecom carriers are already enabling new connections to get activated by verifying users with Aadhaar database.

A prominent journalist who focuses on privacy and laws in India questioned the motive. “When they kickstarted UIDAI, people were told that this an optional biometrics system. But since then the government has been rather tight-lipped on why it is aggressively pushing Aadhaar into so many areas,” he told Mashable India, requesting not to be identified.

"It is especially difficult to explain why privacy is necessary for a society to advance when taken in the context of Aadhaar."

“It is especially difficult to explain why privacy is necessary for a society to advance when taken in the context of Aadhaar. The Aadhaar card is being offered to people in need, especially the poor, by making them believe that services and subsidies provided by the government will be held back from them unless they register,” Satpathy told Mashable India.

The central government said last week Aadhaar number would be mandatory for availing food grains through the Public Distribution System under the National Food Security Act. In October last year, the government made Aadhaar mandatory for those who wanted to avail cooking gas at subsidized prices.

“No matter how many laws are made about not making Aadhaar mandatory, ultimately it depends on the last mile person who is offering any service to inform citizens about their rights,” Satpathy added.

“These last-mile service providers are companies who would benefit from collecting and bartering big data for profit. They would be least interested to inform citizens about their rights and about the not mandatory status of Aadhaar.

“As Aadhaar percolates more and is used by more government and private services, the citizen will start assuming it's a part of their life. This card is already being misunderstood as if it is essential like a passport,” he added.

“My worry is that this data will be used by government for mass surveillance, ethnic cleansing and other insidious purposes,” Satpathy said. “Once you have information about every citizen, the powerful will not refrain from misusing it and for retention of power. The use of big data for psycho-profiling is not unknown to the world anymore.”

Mashable India reached out to UIDAI on Feb. 8 for comment on the privacy and security concerns made in this report. At the time of publication, the authority hadn't responded to our queries.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/mashable-india-february-14-2017-india-aadhaar-uidai-privacy-security-debate

India's Aadhaar mandate for smartphone makers may rile global firms

praskrishna — 2016-09-15T02:25:31Z

They are unlikely to oblige to request to make changes in their operating system and devices to ensure Aadhaar authentication is done securely on smartphones.

The article by Alnoor Peermohammed was published in the Business Standard on September 14, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

India is asking global smartphone makers such asApple and Google to adopt locally designed standards on their devices or operating systems that would allow use of biometric scanners for Aadhaarauthentication, a move that could face resistance from global firms.

Apple, the world’s largest smartphone maker runs its own iOS closed ecosystem and mandates apps built by developers to be certified by the company. Its closest rival Google, which owns the Android operating software that runs on nine out of ten smartphones in India, has directives for device makers to comply with. Firms such as Samsung, Lenovo and Micromax build smartphones on the Android OS that are sold in India.

Most global companies are unlikely to oblige India’s request that would require to make changes in their operating system and devices to ensure Aadhaarauthentication is done securely on smartphones, say analysts.

“There is no clarity so far. As of now, it is impossible that they (global smartphone makers) would oblige for a hardware safe zone baked on the sensors,” says Sunil Abraham, executive director at Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based researcher that works on emerging technologies. “Because the biometrics contain sensitive personal information, they (UIDAI) don’t want anybody — vmobile manufacturer, OS vendor, telco or ISP — to intercept it”.

India is hoping that global firms would accept the country’s plea considering that most of India’s population use a mobile phone as their only computing device and need them to authenticate on Aadhaar for using government and banking services.

“Right now we’re in consultation with all these device manufacturers as well as the operating system vendors,” said Ajay Bhushan Pandey, Director General of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in a phone interview. “Basically we’re trying to evolve our system wherein a manufacturer or the devices where those operating systems are being used will have a facility where Aadhaar authentication can be made possible in a secure manner.”

India has over 105 crore people or 98% of adult population with Aadhaar. Most government and private organisations use Aadhaar authentication to issue services or products such as opening a bank account, getting a ration card or buying a mobile connection.

Reliance plans to reduce paperwork and issue connections in less than an hour usingAadhaar and try to get its 100 million target market sooner.

Over a fifth of India’s one billion users own smartphones and as the country sees better mobile internet access, more people are expected to upgrade to smartphones and use apps to access their banks to transfer funds, do online shopping and access government services.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-alnoor-peermohammed-september-14-2016-indias-aadhaar-mandate-for-smartphone-makers-may-rile-global-firms

India Today Conclave Next 2017: Aadhaar was rushed, says MP Rajeev Chandrashekhar

praskrishna — 2017-11-26T06:41:07Z

Talking at the ongoing India Today Conclave Next 2017, MP Rajeev Chandrashekhar said that Aadhaar was rushed and foisted on the country by authorities that fail to first create a proper ecosystem. Chandrashekhar gave his comments at a keynote titled Privacy -- The Fundamental Right for the Digital Citizen.

The article by Priya Pathak was published by India Today on November 8, 2017.

Chandrashekhar, who has been vocal on the issues like data protection, privacy and net neutrality, said that the government should have created a proper ecosystem for Aadhaar by bringing norms and laws around data protection and privacy before asking people to sign up for the unique ID.

The MP talked about India's journey from being a largest unconnected world to becoming the largest connected world. But Chandrashekhar criticised the "flawed" Aadhaar and said that it was a classic example of how a government system would push for technology in governance without addressing key bits of the ecosystem around the citizen and the consumer.

"If that (Aadhaar) wasn't enough, the IT act and section 66A and its language and its vagueness and its potential for misuse was another example of the faults of a bureaucracy or a political system trying to legislate or create solutions in the digital world, " he said.

At the same time, he lauded the recent Supreme Court order that held all Indians had fundamental right to privacy. "The latest finding of Supreme Court of Privacy as fundamental right is a big deal and it will alter number of things going forward," he said. He added that there should be more debate and discussion on data privacy as there is an attempt to characterise data privacy as some of kind of elitist issue in India which it's not.

Privacy, especially for the digital world, currently is one of the most debated topics in India. The country in the past few years has seen a number of instances where a government or a private entity has knowingly or unknowingly compromised the data of its users. Recently a study published by Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based organisation, revealed that private data of more 130 million Aadhaar card holders were leaked from four government websites.

The Supreme Court in August this year declared privacy as a fundamental right. A nine-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar has declared that "right to privacy is an intrinsic part of Right to Life and Personal Liberty under Article 21 and entire Part III of the Constitution".

The move has been praised by many including Rajeev Chadrashekhar who has said that it is a big welcome step. "It is clear that Aadhaar and all other legislations existing and proposed will have to meet the test of privacy being a fundamental right," he recently said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india-today-priya-pathak-november-8-2017-india-today-conclave-next-2017-aadhaar-was-rushed-says-mp-rajeev-chandrashekhar

India To Introduce Virtual ID For Aadhaar To Strengthen Privacy

Admin — 2018-01-17T00:11:13Z

The government will introduce a virtual identification number for Aadhaar to help strengthen privacy following several instances of data leaks.

The blog post was published by Bloomberg Quint on January 11, 2018.

The additional layer of security is meant to help Aadhaar users avoid sharing their unique identification number at the time of authentication to avail various services and welfare schemes, UIDAI said in a circular seen by BloombergQuint. The virtual ID will be an optional feature and users will be allowed to provide Aadhaar for verification.

The Aadhaar-issuing body, Unique Identification Authority of India, will also introduce limited know-your-customer rules to eliminate the need for agencies to store the biometric ID. Migration to the new system will start from June 1, it added.

Virtual IDs should be made mandatory and the UIDAI should itself generate these codes instead of having the user do it, said Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Center for Internet Security, which has published reports on the security flaws in the world’s largest database.

This takes into account concerns of third-party databases being combined without the consent of the individual but fails to address issues of government surveillance, exclusion and cybersecurity, he added.

The move comes barely a week after The Tribune, a Chandigarh-based newspaper, reported that it could access the Aadhaar database by paying Rs 500, raising privacy concerns. Petitions challenging the validity of Aadhaar and the government’s decision to make it mandatory for everything from bank accounts to mobile services are pending in the Supreme Court.

As of now, citizens are required to share their Aadhaar number for authentication to avail certain services. With the introduction of the virtual ID that would change.

It would be a randomly generated 16-digit number that'd be digitally linked to a person's Aadhaar number. This ID would be temporary and revocable. There can be only one active and valid virtual ID for an Aadhaar number at any given point in time. Aadhaar holders will be able to use the virtual ID whenever authentication is required.

Virtual ID, by design being temporary, cannot be used by agencies for duplication.
UIDAI Circular

Only Aadhaar holders themselves can generate a virtual ID and set a minimum validity period for that after which it will have to be replaced by a new one. The virtual IDs can be changed through UIDAI's portal, at an Aadhaar enrolment centre or using the mAadhaar mobile application, the circular said.

Who Can Store Your Aadhaar Data?

The UIDAI will limit the number of agencies that can access and store your Aadhaar number. For this purpose, it will divide the agencies that seek to use Aadhaar authentication for services into two categories—global and local.

Global authentication agencies will be allowed to "securely" store the Aadhaar number, while local agencies won't. The latter would be the ones that’d use the virtual IDs and a unique token for authentication.

The Aadhaar-issuing body has not clearly defined what would classify as a global agency. It has only said that it will "from time to time" evaluate authentication agencies "based on the laws governing them and categorise them" as global agencies. Any authentication agency that is not classified as global would be local.

Transition To New System

UIDAI has told all agencies that use Aadhaar authentication to update their applications and processes for accepting virtual IDs instead of the Aadhaar number and allow authentication using the UID token. This has to be done by June 1.

If an agency fails to migrate to the new system by then, their authentication services "may be discontinued" and a penalty may be imposed, UIDAI said.

UIDAI will release the updated tools and protocols required for building the authentication software by March 1. All authentication agencies would also receive technical documents, workshops and training session to ensure smooth implementation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bloomberg-quint-january-11-2018-india-to-introduce-virtual-id-for-aadhaar-to-strengthen-privacy

India Still Trying To Turn Optional Aadhaar Identification Number Into A Mandatory National Identity System

praskrishna — 2016-03-24T06:34:21Z

from the sliding-down-the-slippery-slope-to-disaster dept

The blog post was published by Tech Dirt on March 22, 2016. CIS research on Aadhaar was quoted.

Last year, we wrote about India's attempt to turn the use of its Aadhaar system, which assigns a unique 12-digit number to all Indian citizens, into a requirement for accessing government schemes. An article in the Hindustan Times shows that the Indian government is still pushing to turn Aadhaar into a mandatory national identity system. A Bill has just been passed by both houses of the country's parliament, which seeks to give statutory backing to the scheme -- in the teeth of opposition from India's Supreme Court:

There have been orders passed by the Supreme Court that prohibit the government from making Aadhaar mandatory for availing government services whereas this Bill seeks to do precisely that, contrary to the government's argument that Aadhaar is voluntary.

The article notes that in some respects, the new Bill brings improvements over a previous version:

It places stringent restrictions on when and how the UID [Unique Identification] Authority (UIDAI) can share the data, noting that biometric information -- fingerprint and iris scans -- will not be shared with anyone. It seeks prior consent for sharing data with third party. These are very welcome provisions.

But it also contains some huge loopholes:

The government will get sweeping power to access the data collected, ostensibly for "efficient, transparent, and targeted delivery of subsidies, benefits and services" as it pleases "in the interests of national security", thus confirming the suspicions that the UID database is a surveillance programme masquerading as a project to aid service delivery.

The fact that an optional national numbering system now seems to be morphing into a way to monitor what people are doing will hardly come as a surprise to Techdirt readers, but this continued slide down the slippery slope is still troubling, as are other aspects of the new legislation. For example, it was introduced as a "Money Bill," which is normally reserved for matters related to taxation, not privacy. That suggests a desire to push it through without real scrutiny. What makes this attempt to give the Aadhaar number a much larger role in Indian society even more dangerous is the possibility that it won't work:

A recent paper in the Economic and Political Weekly by Hans Mathews, a mathematician with the [Centre for Internet and Society], shows the programme would fail to uniquely identify individuals in a country of 1.2 billion.

A mandatory national identity system that can't even uniquely identify people: sounds like a recipe for disaster.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/tech-dirt-march-22-2016-india-still-trying-to-turn-optional-aadhaar-identification-number-into-mandatory-national-identity-system

India is building a biometric database for 1.3 billion people — and enrollment is mandatory

praskrishna — 2017-05-12T16:22:35Z

Inside the buzzing enrollment agency, young professionals wearing slim-fitting jeans and lanyards around their necks tapped away at keyboards and fiddled with fingerprint scanning devices as they helped build the biggest and most ambitious biometric database ever conceived.

The article by Shashank Bengali was published in the Los Angeles Times on May 12, 2017.

Into the office stepped Vimal Gawde, an impoverished 75-year-old widow dressed in a floral print sari. She had come to secure her ticket to India’s digital future — to enroll in the identity program, called Aadhaar, or “foundation,” that aims to record the fingerprints and irises of all 1.3 billion Indian residents.

Nearly 9 out of 10 Indians have registered, each assigned a unique 12-digit number that serves as a digital identity that can be verified with the scan of a thumb or an eye. But Gawde came to the enrollment office less out of excitement than desperation: If she didn’t get a number, she worried that she wouldn’t be able to eat.

Designed as a showcase of India’s technological prowess — offering identity proof to the poor and reducing waste in welfare programs — Aadhaar’s grand promises have been muddied by controversy as the government makes enrollment mandatory for a growing number of essential services.

Indians now need an Aadhaar number to pay taxes, collect pensions and obtain certain welfare benefits. The rapid expansion of a program that was originally described as voluntary has sparked criticism that India is vacuuming up citizens’ personal information with few privacy safeguards and creating hardship for the very people the initiative was supposed to help.

Like many Indians living in poverty, Gawde uses a ration card to purchase her monthly allotment of subsidized rice and cooking gas. But the shopkeeper told her that starting next month, he would sell to her only if she produced an Aadhaar number.

She had visited the enrollment agency three times but had yet to be approved, for reasons she did not understand. (Enrollment agents would not comment on individual cases.)

Reaching into her canvas bag, Gawde pulled out the familiar panoply of documents — ration card, voter card, electricity bill, income tax ID — that Indians use to navigate a dizzying bureaucracy. Aadhaar, she was told, would supplant all these papers.

But she had to get the number first.

“I’m nervous,” Gawde said outside the enrollment office on a sweltering morning. “I first applied three years ago and submitted all my documents, but didn’t follow up. Now that it’s becoming compulsory, I’m doing everything I can to get it.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had criticized Aadhaar as a “political gimmick” before he took office, has embraced the futuristic idea of an all-in-one digital identity. His party pushed through a law last year that paved the way for a dramatic expansion of Aadhaar, allowing government entities and private businesses wide latitude to access the database, which collects not just people’s names and birth dates but also phone numbers, email addresses and other information.

Soon, as more private companies use the database, it could become difficult to open a bank account, get a new cellphone number or buy plane or train tickets without being enrolled.

Supporters say the program, which has cost about $1 billion to implement, will save multiples of that by curbing tax evasion and ensuring that welfare subsidies are not stolen by middlemen.

“Aadhaar was always meant to be an instrument of inclusion,” Nandan Nilekani, a tech billionaire and the program’s first chairman, said in an interview. “I’m really happy that the current government is completely endorsing Aadhaar and using it for a wide variety of services that will transform governance.”

Nilekani calls Aadhaar “hugely empowering” for the poor, but not long ago even he argued that enrollment should remain optional so that no Indians were prevented from accessing essential services. India’s Supreme Court agreed, ruling in 2015 that the government could not require Aadhaar for any benefit to which a person was otherwise entitled, as long as they could prove their identity by some other means.

Yet the court has stayed silent as Aadhaar creeps into every facet of Indian life, even for children.

A 12-year-old girl named Saiba is a case in point. After the girl’s grandmother passed away in their family’s ancestral village in northern India, Saiba’s mother moved her and her four siblings to a crowded neighborhood on the rough fringes of New Delhi, near a car parts market thick with the smell of grease.

When Saiba’s mother, Rani, went to the local school in April to register her for the sixth grade, administrators turned her down, saying every student must have an Aadhaar number.

But to get a number, a child usually needs a birth certificate — and like one-quarter of children born in this country, Saiba and her siblings did not have them because their village did not routinely register births.

Sitting with her mother in the cramped offices of the local advocacy group Pardarshita, above a noisy street lined with vegetable sellers, the girl puffed her round cheeks in an expression of helplessness.

“I don’t know anything about this,” said Saiba, who, like many Indians, has only one name. “I just want to go to school.”

Rakesh Thakur, a board member of Pardarshita, is trying to obtain Aadhaar numbers for dozens of children barred from Delhi schools. He called the policy “a clear violation” by the municipal government of both the Supreme Court order and India’s Right to Education Act, which guarantees every child younger than 14 free schooling.

A Twitter account called “Rethink Aadhaar” logs new instances almost daily of Indians who have suffered because scanners couldn’t read their fingerprints or because of errors in the database.

In Jawhar, a forested zone about 60 miles north of Mumbai, administrators have told local tribal communities that they will soon use Aadhaar to distribute welfare rations and school lunches. But the area lies outside cellphone range, leading residents to wonder how scanners will connect to the Internet to verify their identities.

“The idea of Aadhaar and the technology may be good, but do we have the infrastructure to make it mandatory?” said Vivek Pandit, a former lawmaker who runs a nonprofit group in the area. “The law is city-centric, and it would only lead to the social exclusion of rural India.”

This month lawyers opposing Aadhaar argued before the Supreme Court that the government could not force Indians to share their biometric data. Atty. Gen. Mukul Rohatgi countered that Indians had no constitutional right to privacy and could not claim an “absolute right” over their bodies.

Without privacy protections, activists worry that as Aadhaar numbers are linked to more and more services, intelligence agencies could use the database to more easily track Indians’ calls, travels and purchases.

“It’s become very clear that this is not a project about the poor,” said Usha Ramanathan, a lawyer and anti-Aadhaar activist. “The government’s ambitions have gotten greater over time.”

This month, the Center for Internet and Society, a New Delhi think tank, reported that federal and state agencies had published up to 135 million Aadhaar numbers — some including sensitive information such as a person’s caste and religion, or details of pension payments — on unsecured websites accessible through just a few clicks.

It’s become very clear that this is not a project about the poor. — Usha Ramanathan, a lawyer and anti-Aadhaar activist

Pranesh Prakash, the center’s policy director, said that when Indian authorities can’t even keep Aadhaar numbers private, as the law requires, it suggests the entire database is vulnerable — particularly after sensitive information involving 22 million Americans was exposed when federal databases were hacked in 2015.

“When these kinds of leaks are happening, it’s rather foolhardy to maintain a database of 1.2 billion people’s biometrics, because once this gets breached, it becomes completely unusable,” Prakash said.

“If your PIN number or password leaks, you can change it. You can’t change your fingerprints.”

Praveen Chakravarty, a former investment banker who worked with Nilekani to launch Aadhaar, believes the lack of safeguards undermines the project’s ideals of efficiency and empowerment. He said many Indians were right to worry that Modi’s government, which has cracked down on political activists and nonprofit groups it opposes, could use Aadhaar to snoop on citizens.

“Maybe Aadhaar didn’t need to be this big,” Chakravarty said, adding that the government could simply have worked to fix inefficiencies in individual welfare programs.

“People could ask, ‘Did we need this at all?’” he said. “It’s a good question.”

For Gawde, the widow, Aadhaar remained an idea of the future. She left the enrollment agency that day empty-handed, told by a young employee that her number had not been assigned. But she retained hope that the new ID would make life easier.

“We are just poor people,” she said. “We have to trust what the government tells us.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/los-angeles-times-shashank-bengali-may-12-2017-india-is-building-a-biometric-database-for-1.3-billion-people-and-enrollment-is-mandatory

In The Biggest Data Leak, Info Of 13 Crore Aadhaar Card Holders Has Been Compromised And Is Available Online

praskrishna — 2017-05-12T15:59:31Z

The Modi government has been trying to make Aadhaar mandatory for everything from Income Tax return, buying a SIM card, bank transaction, train ticket, air travel, mid-day meal government subsidies etc.

The blog post by Bobins Abraham was published by India Times on May 3, 2017.

While the government claims that the move will increase security and ensure that the benefits are reaching to real people and not syphoned off. But security experts have been pointing out the possibility of security breach in the system resulting in the sensitive biometric data reaching in the hands of those, who could misuse them.

A study by Bengaluru-based think tank, Centre for Internet and Society has once again cemented these concerns. According to its report titled, "Information Security Practices of Aadhaar (or lack thereof): A documentation of the public availability of Aadhaar Numbers with sensitive personal financial information," Aadhaar data of as many as 13.5 crore card holders have already leaked online.

The study revealed that the mass data leak happened due to security flaws in four government websites:

National Social Assistance Programme
National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)
Daily Online Payment Reports under NREGA (Govt. of Andhra Pradesh)
Chandranna Bima Scheme run by Government of Andhra Pradesh

“Based on the numbers available on the websites looked at, estimated number of Aadhaar numbers leaked through these four portals could be around 130-135 million and the number of bank account numbers leaked at around 100 million from the specific portals we looked at,” the report said.

The report was published even as the government continue to defend Aadhaar in the Supreme Court saying that the move to link Aadhaar with PAN cards was meant to put a stop on the number of individuals in possession of multiple PAN cards by putting a robust identification system in place. Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said that this will help in curbing money laundering, the flow of black money and controlling the funding of terror.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india-times-bobin-abraham-may-3-2017-in-the-biggest-data-leak-info-of-13-crore-aadhaar-card-holders-has-been-compromised-and-is-available-online

In India, Biometric Data Storage Sparks Demands for Privacy Laws

praskrishna — 2016-03-23T02:27:05Z

In India, calls for strict privacy laws are growing after this week's passage of a measure that allows federal agencies access to biometric data of the nation's citizens, the world's largest such repository.

The article by Anjana Pasricha was published in Voice of America on March 18, 2016. Pranesh Prakash gave inputs.

The government says the use of biometrics will help cut rampant graft in the distribution of subsidies, but activists and opposition lawmakers warn it could usher in an era of increased state surveillance.

Raghubir Gaur, who works as an electrician in the capital, New Delhi, says he has never collected subsidized rations such as wheat and rice, because “somebody else has been taking the rations I should have gotten.” Now, with a national proof of identity, or "Aadhaar" card in his hands, Gaur says he is confident he will be able to access his designated subsidies.

The Aadhaar card is being used to give welfare benefits to the poor, who often cannot provide any proof identity, allowing corrupt officials to siphon entitlements.

The government says it has saved nearly $2 billion by preventing misuse of the subsidies in the last fiscal year alone.

Critics fear ‘police state’

Civil activists and research groups, however, have dubbed the Aadhaar program “surveillance technology” that constitutes a serious breach of privacy. They point to identity-verification systems in other countries, where cards or identification numbers are used for verification without creating a gigantic central database that documents every last transaction.

Indeed, the Aadhaar database also stores fingerprints and iris scans of every account holder, labeling each with a 12-digit identification number.

Concerns that this could lead to a massive invasion of privacy have been heightened because the new law allows the data to be used “in the interest of national security.”

“From verifying yourself to the ticket conductor on a train to someone who is delivering something at your house, all the way to opening a new bank account, all these transactions get logged against the centralized data base," says Pranesh Prakash of the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore. "So this invades your life completely and thoroughly.”

Some lawyers and privacy advocates say this has made it even more important to support a strong privacy law to ensure the huge government database isn't misused.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has defended the biometrics legislation, saying the data will be accessed only in rare cases that require authorization by a senior official.

“You mark my words, you are midwifing a police state,” said lawmaker Asaduddin Owaisi, just one parliamentarian opposed passage of the legislation and found no comfort in Jaitley's assurances.

Fraud concerns

Despite objections, the bill was passed by legislators who argued that such a move is critical to ensuring subsidies reach intended beneficiaries in a country where millions are poor and illiterate.

Attempts to draft a right to privacy bill to protect individuals against misuse of data by government or private agencies date back to 2010, but have made little headway. The latest push started in 2014.

Citing a cyberattack targeting the U.S. government, in which a hacker gained access to the information of millions of people, research groups have also flagged security concerns around India’s ambitious Aadhaar program.

“If this database gets leaked, the entire identification system collapses because people will be able to authenticate themselves as anyone else. So identity fraud is a great concern,” said Prakash of the Center for Internet and Society.

Nearly one billion biometric identity cards have been issued in India in the last six years.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/voice-of-america-anjana-pasricha-march-18-2016-in-india-biometric-data-storage-sparks-demands-for-privacy-laws

Identity of the Aadhaar Act: Supreme Court and the Money Bill Question

Vanya Rakesh and Sumandro Chattapadhyay — 2016-05-09T11:52:44Z

A writ petition has been filed by former Union minister Jairam Ramesh on April 6 challenging the constitutionality and legality of the treatment of this Act as a money bill. The Supreme Court heard the matter on April 25 and invited the Union government to present its view. It is our view that the Supreme Court can not only review the Lok Sabha speaker’s decision, but should also ask the government to draft the Aadhaar Bill again, this time with greater parliamentary and public deliberation. Vanya Rakesh and Sumandro Chattapadhyay wrote this article on The Wire.

Published by and cross-posted from The Wire.

The Aadhaar Act 2016, passed in the Lok Sabha on March 16, 2016, faced opposition ever since it was tabled in parliament. In particular, the move to introduce it as a money bill has been vehemently challenged on grounds of this being an attempt to bypass the Rajya Sabha completely. A writ petition has been filed by former Union minister Jairam Ramesh on April 6 challenging the constitutionality and legality of the treatment of this Act as a money bill. The Supreme Court heard the matter on April 25 and invited the Union government to present its view.

It is our view that the Supreme Court can not only review the Lok Sabha speaker’s decision, but should also ask the government to draft the Aadhaar Bill again, this time with greater parliamentary and public deliberation.

The money bill question

M.R. Madhavan has argued that the Aadhaar Act contains matters other than “only” those incidental to expenditure from the consolidated fund, as it establishes a biometrics-based unique identification number for beneficiaries of government services and benefits, but also allows the number to be used for other purposes beyond service delivery. While Pratap Bhanu Mehta calls this a subversion of “the spirit of the constitution”, P.D.T. Achary, former secretary general of the Lok Sabha, expressed concern about the attempts to pass off financial bills like Aadhaar as money bills as a means to circumvent and erode the supervisory role of the Rajya Sabha. Arvind Datar has further emphasised that when the primary purpose of a bill is not governed by Article 110(1), then certifying it as a money bill is an unconstitutional act.

Article 110(1) of the Constitution identifies a bill as a money bill if it contains “only” provisions dealing with the following matters, or those incidental to them:

imposition and regulation of any tax,
financial obligations undertaken by Indian Government,
payment into or withdrawal from the Consolidated Fund of India (CFI) or Contingent Fund of India,
appropriation of money and expenditure charged on the CFI or receipt, and
custody, issue or audit of money into CFI or public account of India.

However, the link of the Act with the Consolidated Fund of India is rather tenuous, since it depends on the Union or state governments declaring a certain subsidy to be available upon verification of the Aadhaar number. The objectives and validity of the Act would not actually change if the Aadhaar number no longer was directly connected to the delivery of services. The use of the word “if” in section 7 explicitly leaves scope for a situation where the government does not declare an Aadhaar verification as necessary for accessing a subsidy. In such a scenario, the Act will still be valid but without any formal connection with any charges on the Consolidated Fund of India.

A case of procedural irregularity?

The constitution of India borrows the idea of providing the speaker with the authority to certify a bill as money bill from British law, but operationalises it differently. In the UK, though the speaker’s certificate on a money bill is conclusive for all purposes under section 3 of the Parliament Act 1911, the speaker is required to consult two senior members, usually one from either side of the house, appointed by the committee from amongst those senior MPs who chair general committees. In India, the speaker makes the decision on her own.

Although article 110 (3) of the Indian constitution states that the decision of the speaker of the Lok Sabha shall be final in case a question arises regarding whether a bill is a money bill or not, this does not restrict the Supreme Court from entertaining and hearing a petition contesting the speaker’s decision. As the Aadhaar Act was introduced in the Lok Sabha as a money bill even though it does not meet the necessary criteria for such a classification, this treatment of the bill may be considered as an instance of procedural irregularity.

There is ample jurisprudence on what happens when the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review comes up against Article 122 – which states that the validity of any proceeding in the parliament can (only) be called into question on the grounds of procedural irregularities. In the crucial judgment of Raja Ram Pal vs Hon’ble Speaker, Lok Sabha and Others (2007), the court evaluated the scope of judicial review and observed that although parliament is supreme, unlike Britain, proceedings which are found to suffer from substantive illegality or unconstitutionality, cannot be held protected from judicial scrutiny by article 122, as opposed to mere irregularity. Deciding upon the scope for judicial intervention in respect of exercise of power by the speaker, in Kihoto Hollohan vs Zachillhu and Ors. (1992), the Supreme Court held that though the speaker of the house holds a pivotal position in a parliamentary democracy, the decision of the speaker (while adjudicating on disputed disqualification) is subject to judicial review that may look into the correctness of the decision.

Several past decisions of the Supreme Court discuss how the tests of legality and constitutionality help decide whether parliamentary proceedings are immune from judicial review or not. In Ramdas Athawale vs Union of India (2010), the case of Keshav Singh vs Speaker, Legislative Assembly (1964) was referred to, in which the judges had unequivocally upheld the judiciary’s power to scrutinise the actions of the speaker and the houses. It was observed that if the parliamentary procedure is illegal and unconstitutional, it would be open to scrutiny in a court of law and could be a ground for interference by courts under Article 32, though the immunity from judicial interference under this article is confined to matters of irregularity of procedure. These observations were reiterated in Mohd. Saeed Siddiqui vs State of Uttar Pradesh (2014) and Yogendra Kumar Jaiswal vs State of Bihar (2016).

Thus, the decision of the Lok Sabha speaker to pass and certify a bill as a money bill is definitely not immune from judicial review. Additionally, the Supreme Court has the power to issue directions, orders or writs for enforcement of rights under Article 32 of the constitution, therefore, allowing the judiciary to decide upon the manner of introducing the Aadhaar Act in parliament.

National implications demand public deliberation

As the provisions of the Aadhaar Act have far reaching implications for the fundamental and constitutional rights of Indian citizens, the Supreme Court should look into the matter of its identification and treatment as a money bill and whether such decisions lead to the thwarting of legislative and procedural justice.

The Supreme Court may also take this opportunity to reflect on the very decision making process for classification of bills in general. As Smarika Kumar argues, experience with the Aadhaar Act reveals a structural concern regarding this classification process, which may have substantial implications in terms of undermining public and parliamentary deliberative processes. This “trend,” as Arvind Datar notes, of limiting legislative discussions and decisions of national importance within the space of the Lok Sabha must be swiftly curtailed.

Apart from deciding upon the legality of the nature of the bill, it is vital that the apex court ask the government to categorically respond to the concerns red-flagged by the Standing Committee on Finance, which had taken great exception to the continued collection of data and issuance of Aadhaar numbers in its report, and to the recommendations passed in the Rajya Sabha recently. Further, the repeated violation of the Supreme Court’s interim orders – that the Aadhaar number cannot be made mandatory for availing benefits and services – in contexts ranging from marriages to the guaranteed work programme should also be addressed and responses sought from the Union government.

Evidently, the substantial implications of the Aadhaar Act for national security and fundamental rights of citizens, primarily privacy and data security, make it imperative to conduct a duly balanced public deliberation process, both within and outside the houses of parliament, before enacting such a legislation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/identity-of-the-aadhaar-act-supreme-court-and-the-money-bill-question

How the government gains when private companies use Aadhaar

praskrishna — 2016-04-01T15:58:38Z

This blog post by M. Rajshekhar and Anumeha Yadav was published in Scroll.in on March 24, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Last week, Rajya Sabha made a last-ditch attempt to modify the contentious Aadhaar legislation introduced by the Modi government. Since the legislation was introduced as a Money Bill, the Upper House had no powers to amend it. It could only send back the bill with recommended amendments.

One of the clauses which Rajya Sabha wished to amend related to the use of the Aadhaar number, the 12-digit unique identification number assigned after the collection of an individual’s biometrics in the form of fingerprints and iris scans.

Clause 57 said that anyone, whether an individual or a public or private organisation, could use the Aadhaar number. Rajya Sabha voted to restrict the use of the number to the government. After all, the government had justified introducing Aadhaar legislation as a Money Bill by stating that it would be used for delivering government subsidies and benefits funded out of the Consolidated Fund of India. If the delivery of government welfare is the aim of Aadhaar, why should private companies be allowed to use it?

The Rajya Sabha recommended dropping clause 57 to limit the use of Aadhaar to government agencies. But the Lok Sabha rejected its recommendation, and cleared the Bill in its original form, paving the way for private companies to use Aadhaar.

Strikingly, however, well before the Bill was cleared, a private company started advertising its services as “India’s 1st Aadhaar based mobile app to verify your maid, driver, electrician, tutor, tenant and everyone else instantly”. In an article for Scroll.in, legal researcher Usha Ramanathan said, “A private company is advertising that it can use Aadhaar to collate information about citizens at a price. It says this openly, even as a case about the privacy of the information collected for the biometrics-linked government database is still pending in the Supreme Court.”

LinkedIn for plumbers

The company that owns the mobile app called TrustID believes it is not doing anything wrong.

Monika Chowdhry, who heads the marketing division of Swabhimaan Distribution Services, the company that created TrustID, defended the app, saying it offers the valuable service of verifying people's identities. “In our day to day life, we do a lot of transactions with people – like maids or plumbers. Till now, you would have to trust them on what they said about themselves and what others said about the quality of their work.” The company is solving that problem, she said. “We are saying ask the person for their Aadhaar number and name and we will immediately tell you if they are telling the truth or not,” Chowdhry said.

Chowdhry said that over time, the Aadhaar number of individuals will be used to create a private verified database of TrustIDs. “Our plan is to create a rating mechanism,” she said. Referring to the option for maid, plumbers and other service providers on the app, she added: “People like you and me, we have Linkedin and Naukri. What do these people have?”

How does the company use Aadhaar for verification and is there a reason to be concerned?

Aadhaar authentication

After you have logged into the TrustID app, you can choose from a dropdown menu of categories. You can send anyone's Aadhaar number, gender and name – or even biometrics – and the app claims it can verify their identity.

The app performs Aadhaar authentication – which means it matches an Aadhaar number with the information stored against that number in the servers of the Unique Identification Authority of India. At the time an individual enrols for an Aadhaar number, they disclose their name, gender, address and give biometric scans. This information is held in a database maintained by the UID authority.

One of the criticisms of Aadhaar has been that the database of millions of people could be misused in the absence of a privacy law in India. First, there is the question about whether the biometrics are secure. Second, there are risks that accompany the uncontrolled use of unique numbers.

In response, the proponents of Aadhaar have said that the data is encrypted and secure, and can be accessed only by the authority. Those wanting to authenticate – or match – the Aadhaar number cannot directly access the database. They can simply make requests to the authority which authenticates the number for them.

So far, it appeared that the authority was taking Aadhaar authentication requests solely from government agencies. For instance, to pay wages to workers of the rural employment guarantee programme.

But TrustID’s example showed that private companies too have been sending authentication requests to the authority. This is not entirely surprising for those who have followed the blueprint for Aadhaar as envisioned by Nandan Nilekani, its founder. In an interview in 2012, Nilekani spoke about creating a "thriving application system" using Aadhaar for both the public and private sector.

Chowdhary said Swabhimaan Distribution Services registered as an Aadhaar authentication agency in November 2015, and the app was launched in January 2016.

TrustID, or Swabhimaan, is not the only private company that has signed up as an authentication agency for Aadhaar. A quick Google search throws up the name of Alankit, which wants to “provide Aadhaar Enabled Services to its beneficiaries, clients and customers and can further verify the correctness of the Aadhaar numbers provided ” .

This shows the authority entered into agreements with private companies well before the Aadhaar law was passed in Parliament. The companies were running ahead of legislation in a space unbounded by law, and the UIDAI supported them in this.

It is unclear how many private companies were sending requests for Aadhaar authentication. Scroll's questions to Harish Agrawal, the deputy director general of Aadhaar's Authentication and Application Division, remained unanswered.

In an interview to Business Standard, ABP Pandey, the director general of the UIDAI, said, "Usually what happens is that first a law is passed and thereafter the institutions are built and operations start. Here it has happened the other way around. The operations – the enrolment – is almost complete. The organisation is also there and has been working under executive orders. Now everything has to be kind of retrofitted in to the acts and the regulations."

Why is this problematic?

For one, allowing private companies to use the Aadhaar number shows that the government’s stated aims of Aadhaar are misleading.

Both in the Supreme Court and in Parliament, the government has pushed for the use of Aadhaar as an instrument of welfare delivery. It justified passing Aadhaar legislation as a Money Bill by emphasising its importance to its welfare schemes. But as the case of Swabhimaan shows, Aadhaar's uses clearly go well beyond what the Bill's preamble describes as the “targeted delivery of subsidies, benefits and services, the expenditure for which is incurred from the Consolidated Fund of India.”

Two, biometrics and unique identification numbers are a qualitatively new form of private information. As such, they bring unknown risks. India does not have a privacy law, and a law defining the use of biometrics and unique numbers is yet to be created. Delhi-based lawyer Apar Gupta said, “Even the Aadhaar Bill is yet to be approved by the president. Its rules are yet to be drafted. There is not enough legal guidance on its use.”

Three, companies like Swabhimaan would be in a position to construct databases of their own. Take TrustID. When it starts retaining Aadhaar numbers, and adds ratings to them, it creates a database of its own, which amounts to creating profiles of people.

Here, as Ramanathan said, the analogy with the networking site LinkedIn doesn't work. “When I have an account on LinkedIn, I update my data,” she said. But the TrustID app generates profiles out of the ratings that others give. Even if a prospective employee shares his/her Aadhaar number, it does not amount to free consent since getting a job hinges on giving that number.

In the future, companies could use Aadhaar numbers in unknown ways, for instance, to combine multiple databases – banks, telecom companies, hospitals – to create detailed profiles of you and me that they can monetise. In effect, Aadhaar becomes a commercial instrument for private companies, and not just a mechanism for the delivery of government welfare.

Gains for the government

Sunil Abraham, the executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, further explained the risks that arise when databases are combined. He cited the example of OCEAN, the system created by researchers at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology to raise privacy awareness. OCEAN used publicly available information held by the government (voter identity card, PAN card, driving licence) to access details about citizens in Delhi. This public data was combined with people's Facebook and Twitter accounts, and the aggregated results were visualised as a family tree which showed information extending to a person’s parents, siblings and spouse.

"If a company like TrustID tied up with OCEAN, it can create a very detailed profile of an individual," said Abraham. "To continue with the example of a job-seeker, if a employer uses TrustID to verify applicants' identity or profiles, the App may combine a database like OCEAN to track that you logged into Twitter at, say 2 am on most nights. It can profile you as someone who might not turn up at work on time in the morning."

Abraham pointed out that the government too stands to gain by allowing private companies to use Aadhaar for authentication. "Use of authentication by private companies will mean UIDAI can have information on authentications performed on you, or by you, over time in the private sphere as well, say during such a job search," he said. For instance, when TrustID runs a search for your prospective employers using your Aadhaar number, the government knows you have applied for a job at certain companies. "This is unnecessary involvement of the government, giving it access to information in an area that it should not have access to."

Over time, such Aadhaar authentication for private services in companies, hospitals, or hotels will "help the government gain granular data on citizens", he said.

Perhaps that explains why the government rushed the Aadhaar Bill through Parliament, allowing little time and room for public debate.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/scroll.in-march-24-2016-rajshekhar-anumeha-yadav-how-the-govt-gains-when-private-companies-use-aadhaar

How private companies are using Aadhaar to try to deliver better services (but there's a catch)

praskrishna — 2016-12-23T02:04:59Z

They are gathering more information on you.

The article by M. Rajshekhar was published in Scroll.in on December 22, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

In 2006, Ajay Trehan set up AuthBridge, a background verification company in Gurgaon. That was a time when business process outsourcing was booming. Global companies like Citibank were relocating back-office functions to India. Outfits like AuthBridge sprang up in response to help these companies find qualified staffers. They vetted applicants by running identity checks, verifying education and employment records, doing reference checks and more.

Ten years later, AuthBridge’s client profile has changed. With rising insecurity over crimes in India’s cities, like the December 2012 gangrape in Delhi, or the rape of a young woman in an Uber taxi in 2014, local companies – sizeably from e-commerce and businesses with delivery services – have also started vetting employees and partners to check if they have any criminal history. “Now, we have about 700-800 clients,” said Trehan. “Of them, just 20%-30% are foreign companies.”

AuthBridge’s verification process has changed too. Earlier, its employees used to physically verify the credentials of an applicant by travelling to her school or college, meeting her previous employer, vetting her identity papers with the government department that issued them, and so on.

Now they simply run a query on an electronic database.

Aadhaar enters the private sector

Aadhaar, as India’s Unique Identity Project is called, aims to give a 12-digit unique identity number to all residents by collecting their fingerprint and iris scans. As of September, its database, maintained by the Unique Identity Authority of India, held the names, addresses and biometric information of more than 105 crore people.

The project was created by the United Progressive Alliance government in 2009 to reduce leakages in the country’s welfare programmes.

But, quietly, a range of private sector companies have started using it. This includes verification firms like Authbridge, banks like HDFC, telecommunications companies like Reliance Jio, among others.

So far, most discussions on Aadhaar have focused on its utility for welfare delivery and the risk of government surveillance. But as private sector companies incorporate Aadhaar into their systems, fresh questions and concerns are emerging about what this means. A recent tweet by a journalist that went viral encapsulated these concerns.

To understand the rewards and risks of the use of Aadhaar by private companies, here is a detailed look at how they are using it.

Five ways of using Aadhaar

The first way in which companies are using Aadhaar is pure authentication. This is how Authbridge uses Aadhaar. It sends a name and Aadhaar number to the Unique Identity Authority’s server, which responds to say whether they have matched.

Apart from background verification companies, Aadhaar-based authentication can also be used by employers. “A factory hiring women or a security agency hiring guards and wanting to be sure these people are who they claim to be,” said Pramod Varma, the chief architect and technology advisor for the Aadhaar project.

It could also be used by regulated entities with strong Know Your Customer or KYC norms like banks or telecommunications companies. In the old days of branch-based banking, KYC was not a problem, said Varma, since “the bank manager knew all his customers”. But now, KYC is much harder since banks have moved to “core banking with millions of accounts in the server”. Instant Aadhaar-authentication, he said, is useful for verifying customers.

The second is authentication plus. Here, at the time of authentication, a company also downloads the customer’s data from the Aadhaar database. This is what companies like Reliance Jio are doing.

When a customer provides his Aadhaar number to the company, the company not only runs a query on the Aadhaar database to verify the name and number, it also downloads other information about the customer held on the server, like address, date of birth and gender.

This data can be used to electronically fill out the Know Your Customer forms, replacing what is right now a manual process, said Anupam Varghese, the head (products) of Eko India Financial Services, a financial services startup in the phone banking and remittances segment.

It is a disruptive proposition that companies find useful. In India, the cost of enrolling customers is so high, said Abhishek Sinha, the founder of Eko, that it prices a set of financial products beyond the reach of most Indians. “Authenticating a credit card customer and vetting her identity papers will cost anywhere between Rs 150-Rs 200,” he said. A company can recover that investment only if the customer racks up at least Rs 10,000 on the card, assuming a 2% margin on card transactions.

With its instant authentication and automatic form filling, Aadhaar-based electronic Know Your Customer, said Sinha, slashes those costs and makes it easier for companies to offer financial products which become viable even with a smaller volume of transactions. This allows the growth of financial products for less affluent customer segments.

Subsequently, these companies might pad up those databases by adding their own data. This is a third model of using Aadhaar: authentication plus private database.

For instance, TrustID, a mobile app which claims it can verify “your maid, driver, electrician, tutor, tenant and all service professionals” using Aadhaar, wants users to rate the services of the people they eventually employ. In effect, it is creating a private database.

Others, like Eko, are adding financial transaction histories to the Aadhaar data.

While these three uses are built around Aadhaar-based authentication, the remaining three uses – database sharing, data broking, deduplication – pivot around use of just the Aadhaar number. They are based on recent changes in how companies use customer data.

The customer data boom

Customer data has acquired centrality for several Indian companies, particularly startups in e-commerce and financial services.

In some sectors, Varma said, “the cost of switching [between rival companies] is very low,” which heightens the need for customisation. “The better you can serve, they more sticky you get for a customer.” In other sectors, said Varghese, competition chips away at margins. Which is another reason to try and come up with better services and products.

This is where data can help.

In a conversation in October, Nandan Nilekani, software entrepreneur and the first chairperson of the Unique Identity Authority of India, explained why. “Companies like Ola compete with global companies like Uber which have a tremendous advantage in that they have more data – more customers globally – and better algorithms,” he said. If Ola has 5 million customers, Uber has 100 million. Which means Uber’s algorithms – thanks to pattern recognition and machine learning – will be more accurate.

For all these reasons, said Varma, companies in a handful of business verticals are trying to create “a 360 degree view of their customer”.

What has enabled this is a couple of technological trends. The ability to store and process data, said Nilekani, has gone up enormously in the last 15 years. At the same time, data itself has proliferated as electronic devices like mobile phones create records of voice, photos, messages and the locations of customers.

“All this is realtime data. So, on scale, speed and frequency, we have seen a jump,” said Nilekani.

This rising appetite for data is resulting in a couple of novel outcomes.

Enter, the sharing of customer data

Indian companies have begun sharing databases.

A good example is an experimental partnership between Eko, the banking and remittances company, and Capital Float, a financial services startup which gives short term loans.

The two companies worked out an arrangement where Eko shared a part of its database about its distributors with Capital Float. This shared information contained aggregated and anonymised information on distributors and their working capital positions, said Varghese. Capital Float evaluated the database and came back with a list of distributors it could lend to. Eko, then, forwarded these offers to the distributors. After taking their consent, data about the distributors who were interested in the loans was shared with Capital Float.

On the surface, this is a counter-intuitive development: if customer data holds the key to competitive advantage, companies should closely safeguard their data.

But as it turns out, there are strong reasons to share data.

Both Eko and Capital Float, for instance, are small, specialised players in the financial services market which is dominated by banks. Data sharing is one way to compete with banks by offering complementary services to customers.

It is not clear how endemic data-sharing will get. According to Varma, it will be used selectively. “I cannot see organisations sharing databases at will,” he said. “They will be shared only if they can be used to offer an additional service to the client.”

But a programmer who works at iSpirt, a product software evangelising association based in Bangalore, and who did not want to be identified, said the trend will grow. In the financial sector, as new players like mobile wallet companies acquire more customers, banks that refuse to share data will miss out on emergent markets, he said. “Keeping everything behind closed doors – not participating in data exchanges – is now harmful,” he said.

Sunil Abraham, who heads the Centre For Internet and Society, foresees the rise of another kind of data-sharing – by companies that aggregate customer data from multiple sources and market that to clients. These could be data brokers like US-based Acziom, he said. These could also be more specialised firms like medical transcription companies, which simultaneously serve hospitals, insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

The question is: what does all this have to do with Aadhaar?

The utility of Aadhaar

Aadhaar makes it easier to compare and combine diverse databases.

This is what India’s microfinance companies are doing. As Scroll.in reported recently, Microfinance Institutions Network, an association of microlenders, has told its member companies to seed the Aadhaar numbers of their borrowers into their databases. By searching the databases for the Aadhaar number of a prospective borrower, it will be possible to identify if she has already taken too many loans.

This is a scenario Nilekani bristles at. “You do not need Aadhaar for that,” he said. “You can triangulate databases using email or phone number or name.”

But the iSpirt programmer said, “With Aadhaar, the level of certainty is higher than what you would get by using name, phone number or email.” Between databases, the spelling of names might vary. Phone numbers change, especially in a country like India where prepaid mobile connections outnumber postpaid connections. Only a small part of the country’s population uses email. With Aadhaar, said the programmer, it gets easier to correlate databases.

Aadhaar, added Varma, can also be used to clean up databases. Banks, he said, can use the Aadhaar number to create better customer profiles by identifying all accounts owned by a person. This is the fifth use – deduplication.

What it all means

The implications are obvious. A lot of companies already had databases about their customers. Now, as Nilekani said, technology is allowing the collection of ever greater amounts of information about us. The sharing of databases means companies will have ever more detailed customer profiles.

In a sense, we are entering a future where multiple databases – including several that we are not even aware of – will contain information about us. A hospital and an insurance company might share their records. Or intermediary companies, which service both of them, might create their own databases.

This information will materially affect our lives. As already happens online, companies will increasingly base their products on algorithms that parse data about our behaviour and then offer a customised price – which could be geared to serve or exploit us.

These algorithms, as Propublica reported, can be opaque.

In a sense, much of this is a familiar trajectory. The United States too, as the iSpirt programmer said, “saw a lot of irresponsible data sharing without enough control for civilians”.

That is where India is heading as well. As Scroll noted in its article about TrustID, when the company creates scores for the workers who use its app, they might not always be aware of that rating – or be in a position to challenge that rating.

There are large questions here. Who owns the data about you in a company’s database? Take your information in, say, Ola’s database – the address from where you get picked up or dropped, the phone number, the places you visit most often. Is the data owned by you, Ola or the driver? Should you have a say if a company wants to share this data? If you grant permission, how does one ensure it is used correctly?

Right now, as the next story in this series will show, this is a poorly regulated landscape.

This is the third part in a series on the expansion of Aadhaar and the concerns around it. The first two parts can be read here.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/scroll-m-rajshekhar-how-private-companies-are-using-aadhaar-to-deliver-better-services-but-theres-a-catch

How Aadhaar compromises privacy? And how to fix it?

sunil — 2017-04-01T07:00:06Z

Aadhaar is mass surveillance technology. Unlike targeted surveillance which is a good thing, and essential for national security and public order – mass surveillance undermines security. And while biometrics is appropriate for targeted surveillance by the state – it is wholly inappropriate for everyday transactions between the state and law abiding citizens.

The op-ed was published in the Hindu on March 31, 2017.

When assessing a technology, don't ask - “what use is it being put to today?”. Instead, ask “what use can it be put to tomorrow and by whom?”. The original noble intentions of the Aadhaar project will not constrain those in the future that want to take full advantage of its technological possibilities. However, rather than frame the surveillance potential of Aadhaar in a negative tone as three problem statements - I will propose three modifications to the project that will reduce but not eliminate its surveillance potential.

Shift from biometrics to smart cards: In January 2011, the Centre for Internet and Society had written to the parliamentary finance committee that was reviewing what was then called the “National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010”. We provided nine reasons for the government to stop using biometrics and instead use an open smart card standard. Biometrics allows for identification of citizens even when they don't want to be identified. Even unconscious and dead citizens can be identified using biometrics. Smart cards, on the other hand, require pins and thus citizens' conscious cooperation during the identification process. Once you flush your smart cards down the toilet nobody can use them to identify you. Consent is baked into the design of the technology. If the UIDAI adopts smart cards, we can destroy the centralized database of biometrics just like the UK government did in 2010 under Theresa May's tenure as Home Secretary. This would completely eliminate the risk of foreign governments, criminals and terrorists using the biometric database to remotely, covertly and non-consensually identify Indians.

Destroy the authentication transaction database: The Aadhaar Authentication Regulations 2016 specifies that transaction data will be archived for five years after the date of the transaction. Even though the UIDAI claims that this is a zero knowledge database from the perspective of “reasons for authentication”, any big data expert will tell you that it is trivial to guess what is going on using the unique identifiers for the registered devices and time stamps that are used for authentication. That is how they put Rajat Gupta and Raj Rajratnam in prison. There was nothing in the payload ie. voice recordings of the tapped telephone conversations – the conviction was based on meta-data. Smart cards based on open standards allow for decentralized authentication by multiple entities and therefore eliminate the need for a centralized transaction database.

Prohibit the use of Aadhaar number in other databases: We must, as a nation, get over our obsession with Know Your Customer [KYC] requirements. For example, for SIM cards there is no KYC requirement is most developed countries. Our insistence on KYC has only resulted in retardation of Internet adoption, a black market for ID documents and unnecessary wastage of resources by telecom companies. It has not prevented criminals and terrorists from using phones. Where we must absolutely have KYC for the purposes of security, elimination of ghosts and regulatory compliance – we must use a token issued by UIDAI instead of the Aadhaar number itself. This would make it harder for unauthorized parties to combine databases while at the same time, enabling law enforcement agencies to combine databases using the appropriate authorizations and infrastructure like NATGRID. The NATGRID, unlike Aadhaar, is not a centralized database. It is a standard and platform for the express assembly of sub-sets of up to 20 databases which is then accessed by up to 12 law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

To conclude, even as a surveillance project – Aadhaar is very poorly designed. The technology needs fixing today, the law can wait for tomorrow.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/hindu-op-ed-sunil-abraham-march-31-2017-how-aadhaar-compromises-privacy-and-how-to-fix-it

Hammered government offers Virtual ID firewall to protect your Aadhaar

Admin — 2018-01-16T23:34:12Z

Days after reports surfaced claiming security breaches, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on Wednesday announced the implementation of a new security protocol that would remove the need to divulge Aadhaar numbers during authentication processes and limit third-party access to KYC details.

The article was published in New Indian Express on January 11, 2018.

Admitting that the “collection and storage of Aadhaar numbers by various entities has heightened privacy concerns”, the UIDAI circular said Authentication User Agencies (AUAs) providing Aadhaar services have to be ready to implement the protocol from March 1, 2018. From June 1 use of Virtual ID for authentication would be mandatory.

The linchpin of the new protocol will be the virtual ID (VID) — a “temporary, revocable 16-digit random number” that can be used instead of Aadhaar to verify or link services. VIDs will have a limited validity and can be generated only by the Aadhaar holder. “UIDAI will provide various options to generate, retrieve and replace VIDs… these will be made available via UIDAI’s resident portal, Aadhaar Enrolment Centre, mAadhaar mobile application, etc.,” it said. While only one VID per Aadhaar number will be valid at a time, users can revoke and generate new VIDs as many times as desired.

UIDAI will also limit KYC details accessible by AUAs by classifying them as Global AUAs, which are required to use Aadhaar e-KYC by law, and Local AUAs. Only the former will have full access to e-KYC details and can store Aadhaar numbers. Local AUAs will only have access to limited KYC details and be prohibited from storing Aadhaar numbers. UIDAI will also generate UID tokens which will be used to identify customers within agencies’ systems, but these will not be usable by other AUAs.

However, cybersecurity experts say that even if the new “patch” is effective, verification processes will have to be redone to prevent misuse of already-leaked Aadhaar numbers. “The concept is attractive, but the devil is in the details,” observed Pavan Duggal, cyberlaw expert, adding that the new system does not address those who have already gained unauthorised access to Aadhaar numbers. Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society, was more categorical. “If it has to be effective, they will have to redo (Aadhaar-KYC) from scratch.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/indian-express-january-11-2018-