{"id":36323,"date":"2018-11-02T12:10:37","date_gmt":"2018-11-02T06:40:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.forumias.com\/?p=36323"},"modified":"2018-11-02T12:10:37","modified_gmt":"2018-11-02T06:40:37","slug":"an-argument-without-aadhaar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/an-argument-without-aadhaar\/","title":{"rendered":"An argument without Aadhaar:\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/opinion\/columns\/an-argument-without-aadhaar-4735764\/\">An argument without Aadhaar<\/a><\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Context<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There is a huge furor going on with regard to the privacy issue related to the Aadhar<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Lack of Credible Analysis<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been alarming reports of exclusion and disruption in social welfare but it is still unclear whether they are due to fixable teething troubles, careless deployment or something more fundamental<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The opponents too have been unable to make precise how exactly Aadhaar violates privacy<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At the same time, the UIDAI and ministerial claims declaring Aadhaar to be perfectly has failed to imbibe confidence.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The potential privacy breaches that has been identified are actually \u00a0trivial and easily fixable<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>The Controversy<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The government clearly wants to use the unique identification of Aadhaar to enforce compliance in a variety of schemes by avoiding duplicates.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The opponents want Aadhaar to be voluntary<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>The Missing Factor<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In midst of the growing debate between the voluntariness and enforcement of Aadhar and the media hype, the potential benefits of Aadhaar beyond de-duplication, for example in analytics, have not even been discussed much.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Biased Verdict in Aadhar-PAN Linkage<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The petitioner\u2019s argument on legislative competence \u2014 that the linkage cannot be made mandatory in the IT Act without first removing the contradiction from the original Aadhaar Act \u2014 appeared to be compelling. Yet the court dismissed it.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The petitioner\u2019s arguments under Article 14, that the mandate discriminates between different classes of taxpayers, must have sounded tenuous even to the petitioners and were summarily rejected.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The argument that PAN cancellation violates the right to practice any profession was accepted, but so were the state\u2019s arguments on the need for de-duplication.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The court also accepted, without question or calling for any analysis, the state\u2019s assertion that biometric de-duplication is perfect.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The petitioners had put forth another set of problematic arguments based on dignity and bodily autonomy, on the state\u2019s right of eminent domain over the human body and on informational self-determination. The court deferred them for consideration by a larger bench, along with all issues related to privacy.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Inadequate Consideration of Privacy Issue<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The main issue is privacy, which the court has been deferring, and little has been said on it to enable an informed decision.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Fingerprints and iris scans (both can be contact-less) are fundamentally no different from facial photographs; they are images and not parts of one\u2019s body. They can be used for matching and de-duplication either manually or automatically.<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They differ only in efficacy and not in principle.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">However, the response from the state \u2014 claiming that the state indeed has a right over the human body \u2014 was irrelevant and disproportionate<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On the one hand, the state\u2019s position that Aadhaar is safe because UIDAI stores only minimal data required for biometric matching and demographic details, is untenable.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The government and UIDAI cannot absolve themselves of the responsibility of protecting users from privacy breaches through possible correlation attacks on linked databases.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Further, the possibilities of insider attacks also need to be considered.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On the other hand, the opponent\u2019s claim \u2014 that collecting biometric information and storing them in a central database and linking multiple databases through the Aadhaar number fundamentally violates privacy \u2014 is also without any careful evaluation of a precise threat model<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For example, PAN cards are already linked to bank accounts, ITR and major purchases. How does linking Aadhaar increase the possibilities for correlation attacks?<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Biometric and demographic details are publicly available anyway, and anybody determined enough can obtain these from touched objects and using a powerful camera even without the victim\u2019s cooperation.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There is no doubt that using biometrics for authentication, to access bank accounts will be unsafe but poses no threat <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">in case of identity verification and de-duplication<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Way Forward<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There is a \u00a0need to exhaustively enumerate the possible ways in which privacy may be compromised and model an attack surface<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Only then can the questions related to privacy protection, either through technical or legal means, even be asked.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The assertion that privacy protection is impossible with biometrics and a global ID is far from established<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Conclusion<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It will not be enough to apply a traditional understanding of privacy to the new scenarios presented by digital identity and the internet<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The need of the hour is for our institutions to wake up and carry out conservative, detailed and rigorous analysis of all issues involved \u2014 social, economic, technical and legal.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Till then, it will be best to go slow with Aadhaar, engage, analyse, correct, and ensure that there are no hardships.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An argument without Aadhaar:\u00a0 Context There is a huge furor going on with regard to the privacy issue related to the Aadhar Lack of Credible Analysis There have been alarming reports of exclusion and disruption in social welfare but it is still unclear whether they are due to fixable teething troubles, careless deployment or something&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/an-argument-without-aadhaar\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">An argument without Aadhaar:\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-test-1","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":{"total":0,"cached_at":"","cached_date":1704211014},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}