AADHAAR RELATED ARTICLES: 11064 - Silicon Valley’s Hortonworks eyes India’s big data market

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

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

11064 - Silicon Valley’s Hortonworks eyes India’s big data market - The Hindu

Silicon Valley’s Hortonworks eyes India’s big data market

Peerzada Abrar

BENGALURU APRIL 16, 2017 00:00 IST

Smelling opportunties:Arun Murthy (R), co-founder of Hortonworks, with Kamal Brar, vice president, Asia Pacific, Hortonworks.

Country key to firm’s growth outside of North America, says co-founder Murthy

Hortonworks Inc. stunned the tech industry a few years ago when it became the fastest enterprise software start-up to reach $100 million in annual revenue in just four years from inception. The California-based company said that it now saw its next big growth coming from international business and the Indian market is going to play a key role in it. It is betting big on selling its services and support for the Hadoop open-source data analytics technology framework to the Indian enterprises as well as government’s big data projects like the ID platform Aadhaar.

“We have captured a significant amount of market in North America,” Arun Murthy, the 35-year-old co-founder and vice president for engineering at Hortonworks, said in an interview. “I think a lot of our growth would come internationally and India would be a key part of that.”

The firm leads a bunch of companies that are pursuing the opportunity to monetise Hadoop, an open source software platform for distributed storage and processing of very large data sets on computer clusters built from commodity hardware. Hadoop was built at Yahoo! in the mid-2000s to help the Internet portal compete with Google.

Origins at Yahoo!

In 2011, serial entrepreneur Rob Bearden partnered with Yahoo! to establish Hortonworks with 24 engineers from the original Hadoop team including founders like Alan Gates and Arun Murthy. The original developer of Hadoop, Doug Cutting, who named the platform after his son’s yellow stuffed toy elephant, works at Cloudera, which is Hortonwork’s rival.

Prior to co-founding Hortonworks, Mr. Murthy, an alumnus of Visvesvaraya Technological University was responsible for all MapReduce code and configuration deployed across more than 42,000 servers at Yahoo!. MapReduce, which is the core component of Hadoop, is the original framework for writing applications that process large amounts of data.

In 2014, Hortonworks’ market capitalisation exceeded $1 billion in an initial public offering. But the market cap has now come down to about $662 million. To bolster its growth, Hortonworks is now eyeing opportunities in the Indian market as well as to hire talent here. This month, it opened a larger office in Bengaluru which houses the company’s engineering and support teams, in addition to the India sales team.

“The consumption (of data) in this market, with Digital India, is phenomenal,” said Kamal Brar, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Hortonworks. He said customers in India were already using Hadoop especially in sectors such as e-commerce and telecommunications. The government too was open to adopting such open-source technologies, he said. “That is proven with Aadhaar, digital locker and now the payment gateways coming through the demonetisation move,” said Mr. Brar.

Eightfold growth

The big data industry in the country is expected to grow eightfold to touch $16 billion by 2025 from the present size of $2 billion, according to the IT trade body NASSCOM.

Globally, Hortonworks provides its platform to customers such as the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), healthcare organisation Mayo Clinic, online retailer eBay and digital music service Spotify.

The platform would enable customers in India to run big data analytics technology to mine hidden insights, patterns and unknown correlations from large chunks of data.

This helps scientists to speed up drug discovery, farmers to increase yields, exploration companies to discover oil and e-commerce companies to predict customer behaviour.

For example, UNOS, the private, non-profit organisation managing the U.S. organ transplant system, is using the Hortonworks Data Platform to help transplant professionals make more informed decisions when life-saving organs become available.

Peerzada Abrar