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

Aadhaar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, MP Rajya Sabha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) Denial

2) Issue fiats and point finger

3) Shoot messenger

4) Bury head in sand.

God Save India

Monday, August 14, 2017

11772 - Information privacy: Masking data to protect it There must be a trade-off between data collection and data security - E T Bureau


ET Bureau  |  August 12, 2017, 09:19 IST

By Atanu Biswas & Bimal Roy



Much of the debate being conducted these days on the efficacies of data collection for public good, primarily dealing with Aadhaar, rightly hinges on matters of privacy and the safety of the data collected. This has gained more traction after a software development engineer from Bengaluru,

Abhinav Srivastava, was arrested on August 1for allegedly hacking and accessing private data of individuals through the Unique Identification Authority of India’s ‘secure’ database.

Brand Solutions


Which prompts the notion that there must be a trade-off between data collection and data security. Well, that certainly need not be the case.

But let’s first start with the important issue of the quality of data collected. The more error-free the data the better, right? Wrong. Suppose you want to find out the percentage of students drinking alcohol in a hostel.

If you ask, ‘Do you drink alcohol?’, it may be difficult for students to say ‘yes’ even if that is the correct answer.
So, the surveyor may add a second simple question, such as ‘Were you born between January and June?’ Here, the probability of a ‘yes’ is 50%, and there is no reason of getting an incorrect answer.

The students can be asked to toss a coin (with 50% probability of ‘heads’) and to answer the first question if it’s ‘heads’, and the second question if it’s ‘tails’. It is expected that everyone will give the correct answer, as the outcome of the toss is unknown to others. So, the answer to the first question is masked by the coin flip and the second question. But now, the surveyor can easily guess the proportion of students who drink alcohol in the hostel.

A study with 400 students results in, say, 140 ‘yes’ answers. We can assume that around 200 students had ‘heads’, and the remaining 200 got ‘tails’. About half of the second lot of nearly 200 students are expected to be born during January-June. So, roughly 100 ‘yes’ replies came from the second question.

The remaining about 40 ‘yes’ answers are from roughly 200 students who have answered the first question.

This means that about 20% of the students drink alcohol. It is also possible to estimate the amount of error in our calculations.
In this particular example, the survey could yield disastrous result without the mask of the second question, which obfuscated the student’s personal information. Obfuscating information provides idea on drinking habit of the students as a whole, and that is all we need. We cannot get the students’ personal information, we do not even need them.

This simple statistical example illustrates that we can get a lot of valuable information for society while ensuring the privacy of individuals. Suppose, for a complex and expensive surgery, there are options to choose between different available hospitals and doctors. Apart from the cost, the success rates of hospitals and doctors can certainly be very important criteria. Some hospitals might supply their success stories, sometimes only the number of cured people, not the total number of patients. In most of the cases, we do not have proper data in such context.

Well, what if the hospitals’ websites had the full story of treatments of all patients? On one hand, it would have been very bad, because it could hamper the privacy of the patients. So, instead of ditto information of each patient, the data can be provided by incorporating some suitably chosen ‘random error’, and the distribution of the ‘random error’ should also be mentioned. The personal informationof the patient is completely hidden and collective data, rates of successful treatments of patients in different hospitals and by doctors, can be obtained. Different types of e-health records and financial information have already been obfuscated for other purposes. GoI needs to provide appropriate regulations and softwares to obfuscate different types of information, and to maintain a countrywide balance.

The choice of appropriate ‘random error’ is a delicate question. That collective information is properly obtainable from the obfuscated data should be ensured. But the original and the obfuscated data should differ in mathematical language, and the probability of a large difference between them should reasonably be high. And this obfuscation should be one way: it should be seen that the original individual information can never be retrieved from the obfuscated data.

Various government and private sector organisations can be brought under compulsory obfuscation, where publicising obfuscated data will not be detrimental to national security.

Policymakers may decide and encourage on the issues where disclosure of obfuscating data in the public domain can be helpful to society.
The writers are professors, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.