AADHAAR RELATED ARTICLES: 7212 - What did developers come up with at the Aadhaar Hackathon?

In 2009, I became extremely concerned with the concept of Unique Identity for various reasons. Connected with many like minded highly educated people who were all concerned.

On 18th May 2010, I started this Blog to capture anything and everything I came across on the topic. This blog with its million hits is a testament to my concerns about loss of privacy and fear of the ID being misused and possible Criminal activities it could lead to.

In 2017 the Supreme Court of India gave its verdict after one of the longest hearings on any issue. I did my bit and appealed to the Supreme Court Judges too through an On Line Petition.

In 2019 the Aadhaar Legislation has been revised and passed by the two houses of the Parliament of India making it Legal. I am no Legal Eagle so my Opinion carries no weight except with people opposed to the very concept.

In 2019, this Blog now just captures on a Daily Basis list of Articles Published on anything to do with Aadhaar as obtained from Daily Google Searches and nothing more. Cannot burn the midnight candle any longer.

"In Matters of Conscience, the Law of Majority has no place"- Mahatma Gandhi

Ram Krishnaswamy

Sydney, Australia.

Aadhaar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, MP Rajya Sabha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) Denial

2) Issue fiats and point finger

3) Shoot messenger

4) Bury head in sand.

God Save India

Friday, January 16, 2015

7212 - What did developers come up with at the Aadhaar Hackathon? - Your Story

What did developers come up with at the Aadhaar Hackathon?

Jubin Mehta | January 15, 2015 at 8:12 am

Unique identification project was initially conceived by the Planning Commission as an initiative that would provide identification for each resident across the country and would be used primarily as the basis for efficient delivery of welfare services. It would also act as a tool for effective monitoring of various programs and schemes of the Government. As a part of this initiative, an open API is made available to developers and they’re encouraged to build tools over the Aadhaar platform.

Khosla Labs held an Aadhaar Hackathon on the 10th & 11th of January, 2015 in technical collaboration with Aadhaar and industry collaboration with NASSCOM. Here re some key points from the Hackathon:

• The Hackathon attracted 1800 applicants of which 140 developers were chosen. The participants came from all parts of India – Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kochi and Chennai.

• Khosla Labs trained the developers in integrating with Aadhaar in 1hr and also provided them with biometric sensors to build Aadhaar applications. After which the 36 teams (out of the 140 developers) spent 24hrs coding Aadhaar applications in a wide range of domains- Aadhaar based Medical records, Aadhaar Digital Locker, Aadhaar Oauth (like “Login in with Facebook”), Taxi driver verification etc.

Here are the winners:

The winning team was a team of 3 students, Abhilash Panigrahi, Pratham Mehta and Sachin Vasista from the 3rd year of the engineering programme at VIT – Vellore Institute of Technology. These 3 students built the Aadhaar Application – Aadhaaritory – a healthcare application that ties an individual’s Aadhaar number to his electronic medical history, allows doctors to update it and is portable for the individual across various healthcare providers and geographies.

The 2nd prize winners – Satyendra Kumar Pandey, Tarun Rathor, Vimal Makadia and Sanketh. Their Aadhaar application Adhaar Box – a cloud based document repository that can manage and share Aadhaar verified e-documents, this digital locker can be used to store documents and government certificates and given access to by using Aadhaar authentication.

The 3rd prize winners – Charan Raj, Kiran, Nishant and Umesh. Their Aadhaar application was True Identity – an Aadhaar OAuth identity verification service built on other online identities such as LinkedIn, Twitter, similar to a “Login with Facebook”. Once you login to the Aadhaar authenticated service, your can then login to other sites that accept the Aadhaar based OAuth.

This was a good start to spread awareness about Aadhaar’s open API but we’re still far from reaching a point of satisfactory developer confidence. Our search for companies using Aadhaar open API ended at Rasilant Technologies. CTO Shiladitya Mukhopadhayaya shared his experience-

Aadhaar has an open API which they have published and also give some sample applications that you can try out with it. The basic authentication that they allow third party apps as of now is to verify an entry in the aadhaar database by means of querying any of the data points they capture. Such as – First Name + Aadhaar No., or Left Index Fingerprint + Last Name, etc. The API then returns a true or false of if these credentials are stored in their database under the same entry and hence are a match / verified. The more parameters you query, the more matched the data is and hence more secure.

We are using the above in a cloud based attendance application we have developed for universities and corporates which uses biometric fingerprint detection hardware connected to our cloud platform to authenticate faculty and employees for various locations across India. Our cloud platform uses the Aadhaar API for verifying each user during enrollment into our platform and then that identity is considered authenticated. This is similar to the open government application hosted on attendance.gov.in which also uses the platform and does biometric attendance.

We are extending the use of the API to more of our applications as well once clients start accepting it as an additional layer of verification, we are already providing it in our visitor management systems for corporates (banks), driver identification systems for secure installations (oil refineries) and some more.

Learn more about the Aadhaar API.