BY T K ARUN, ET BUREAU | MAY 07, 2017, 08.17 AM IST
Big Brother is watching you- this is no longer Orwellian dystopia but the mundane reality of a world permeated by technology that uses biometrics to identify, geopositioning to locate and monitoring of online conduct to sell relevant advertisements.
The Naked Ape used to be a book by ethologist Desmond Morris; now it is you and me and anyone else who uses myriad applications (apps) on our smartphones, after blithely signing up to terms of use that we never bother to read but grant permission to peel off, one after another, the layers of wilful non-disclosure behind which we imagine we remain private.
Cameras watch you in stores, in front of your computer, taking a selfie or talking to someone on Skype, FaceTime or Google Hangouts, at traffic lights. These cameras are getting better every day: some can capture the details of your iris, besides the details of your facial features, which also are biometric markers of identity, from 10 metres away. Combine that with facial recognition software, and the difference between you and that little fish in the glass bowl is that you just can’t swim as well.
Your phone messages are stored by the phone companies for a mandated period, for police agencies to examine, if they feel the need to. In the US, calls are recorded and stored routinely, to be taken up for investigation, if warranted — as, for example, were conversations between the Boston marathon bomber and his wife.
When we routinely use our fingerprints to unlock our smartphone, does it make sense to complain that the government wants to use the same facility to authenticate our identity? There are good reasons for governments to determine the identity of individuals.
We no longer live in a state of nature, of harmless innocence. The serpent has been hard at work, huckstering around the world. Ask not if people everywhere have taken their bite of his fruit. Ask only, was it Delicious or Fuji? Human beings live as an interconnected, increasingly global community of intelligent beings located in a matrix of technology capable of both malign and benign use. People are mobile across borders on an ever-increasing scale, transferring technology and capital, jobs and hopes, raindrops on noses and whiskers on kittens.
They also transport across borders drugs, young girls meant for the flesh trade, illicit money, disease, weapons and terror. The safety and security of the majority call for the state’s ability to identify and pin down the malign minority. Precise means of identification are essential — for everyone, because you do not know beforehand who’s a deatheater and who’s the good guy.
The G20 has an ongoing programme to create a Unique Legal Entity Identifier, which would identify any individual or company or trust capable of economic activity, so as to clearly identify the beneficiary of any transaction.
It remains a work in progress, but will not halt. The UK, under the conservative government of David Cameron, has mandated every British firm to disclose its beneficial owners. Anyone who seeks a visa to the US or the European Union has to part with his biometric data. Many governments around the world have required or are in the process of requiring citizens’ identity documents to include biometric data.
Aadhaar internalises this dynamic of modern reality. It is useful for efficient administration and dispensing of government services. It saves the government huge amounts of money, which is not an insignificant detail in our developing country.
The problem is not with Aadhaar but with the potential for misuse of the data on individuals it collects and stores. Just storing everyone’s text messages does not breach privacy, reading them does. Those who object to Aadhaar assume that the state would, once it has such data in its control, automatically use it for purposes unacceptable to a free citizen. The point is to statutorily remove that automaticity, by means of a rigorous privacy law.
A man’s medical condition is his private business, you would agree. But what if he is infected with a disease that could spread and afflict an entire population? That negative externality makes it imperative for the state to breach his autonomy over his own body and isolate him and treat him, even if he does not want to. But first, it must be established that he poses a threat to public safety. There must be a protocol for that, an authority to determine that, a system of holding that authority to account.
The same principle must apply in the case of Aadhaar. Personal data tagged with Aadhaar ought to lie in separate silos. Their separation should be breached only when a clear case is established for its need, and specific authorisation obtained, this being open to scrutiny ex post, by a committee of Parliament, in every case. Spooks cannot have carte blanche. Once Aadhaar comes with stringent, verifiable regulation of how the data obtained for it is used, its benefits would outweigh its harm. That is the way to go about it
