AADHAAR RELATED ARTICLES: 8189 - AngelPrime & HackerEarth declare Aadhaar hackathon’s winners

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, June 29, 2015

8189 - AngelPrime & HackerEarth declare Aadhaar hackathon’s winners - Medianama

AngelPrime & HackerEarth declare Aadhaar hackathon’s winners

By Sneha Johari ( @thejunebug ) on June 26, 2015

VC fund AngelPrime has declared the winners of its online Aadhaar hackathon which was held on June 6 and 7.

AngelPrime said that Aadhaar APIs like biometric, eKYC, demographic, OTP and OTP eKYC authentications were exposed to developers along with the provision of USB based biometric sensors and their Windows and Android SDKs from Morpho. Khosla Labs also opened up the APIs of its Aadhaar Bridge product, which could be used to integrate the services on the developers’ apps.

Student ID verification app: The winner of the hackathon is the True Scholar app, developed by Bangalore’s Anantha Padmanabha, which uses Aadhaar APIs to verify student identity. It provides a central database for all exam results, online exam registrations and also claims to prevent impersonation during exams.

Document-less verification through Aadhaar: The first runner up is an app called Aadhaarical, developed by Pankaj Chhabra, Supriya Saini, Ishrat Khan and Sachin Arora from Delhi, which enables document-less verification in real time via Aadhaar cards. The app also claims use cases for reporting vehicle theft, tracking missing vehicles, challan issuance, online e-document access to resident and traffic police and car towing notifications when a car is parked in a no parking zone.

Local partnerships for social marketplace: The second runners up position is tied between three teams. The first is an app called Samaadhaar, a social marketplace which claims to connect non-internet users in India to products and service providers through local partnerships. Developed by Dawar Dedmari , Brijesh Masrani, Mahendra Liya and Manan Saleem Beg from Bangalore, the app also provides personalised content and info to users based on an Aadhaar verification.

Driving license through Aadhaar verification: The second team Sumanyu Soniwal, Shubham Gupta, Soubhik Saha from Agra, Lucknow and Ghaziabad, created an app called Aadhaaric License which aims at letting people obtain a driving license through a free online procedure by using their Aadhaar card. The third team of Thiyagarajan, Rajeef, Priyanka and Ashir from Bangalore developed an app called 18-plus which, paired with a fingerprint scanner, lets organisations verify people’s ages.

AngelPrime said that over 5,200 developers from Indians living in and outside the country participated in the hackathon, forming over 1,600 teams who built products surrounding the themes of payments, productivity, government benefits, financial services, FMCG, healthcare and online to offline.

The applications were required to use Aadhaar APIs and were judged on the basis of code quality and ‘sophistication’ of the app by Dr Parmod Varma (Chief Architect of UIDAI), Arvind Gupta (BJP convenor and national head of IT), Ravi Gururaj (Chairman of Nasscom Product Council) and Sanjay Swamy (Managing Partner at AngelPrime). UIDAI volunteers Raj Mashruwala, Sanjay Jain and Dr Vivek Raghavan screened and rated the submissions, shortlisting 11 final teams. The hackathon was administered through the HackerEarth Sprint, a tool developed by HackerEarth for conducting large scale online hackathons.

Image Credit: Flicker user Sebastiaan ter Burg