Aadhar- A special identification or violation of privacy rights
The “Digital India” & “Make in India” project has always been a top priority for the government of Modi. As a part of the Digital India initiative, the central government agreed to have a Unique Identification (UID) mandatory for each Indian citizen (popularly recognised as One Country One Identity). A person’s UID is recognised by the Aadhar card, which is now expected to be generated almost anywhere. If it is correlated with opening a bank account, saving in mutual funds, purchasing a new sim card, paying electronically, travelling, etc. The Aadhar Card is now the most relevant and compulsory identification in India.
As we know, the Aadhar Card includes demographic and biometric details of a person to whom it belongs, making this identification very important and extremely confidential. In fact, no nation in the world has ever adopted an identity of this kind. If lost or targeted by any hacker, the existence of the data Aadhar Card brings with it will result in heavy harm in financial and personal terms.
Data Vulnerability
The Supreme Court bench hearings on the Procedural Legitimacy of Aadhar were conducted in January 2018 in a series of proceedings. Kapil Sibal claimed that, in one of the Supreme Court hearings, there is no country in the world that uses a central ID scheme. When Justice Ashok Bhushan stated that Aadhaar could be used under that clause to determine the identification of individuals under other laws, Sibal said that any meaning other than that it was voluntary to use Aadhaar to determine one ‘s identity would be “horrible.”
While considering the fact that the storage of biometric data is susceptible to attack, Mr. Sibal suggested numerous methods of validating one ‘s identity. Sibal gave an example of where biometrics are encrypted in a smart card in most jurisdictions for the introduction of biometrics so that they will not be stolen, just like an SSL certificate is used on a computer to secure sensitive data from consumers.
The sort of data that can be targeted
It is really important to remember here that every database can be compromised in this country, and even a graduate can hack the whole system. For smart cards, this is not the same situation as all the information is stored on a chip and can not be smuggled out. That is why biometric data leakage absolutely undermines the scheme.
Aadhar’s data leakage incidents were true and evidence was submitted before the court. It is very important to maintain a high degree of protection for such records, as the leakage of biometric data is irreversible.
Aadhar Project and Inherent design faults
There are different elements of the Aadhar project that pose risks to biometric data. In the Aadhaar project, some of the key inherent design shortcomings that seriously compromise the protection and protection of biometric data of people are as follows:
Centralized database: Every existing database in the world is vulnerable to attack and when the database is a centralised database, the situation gets worse. Thousands of crores of people linked to the database could lose sensitive data.
Biometric failures: Kapil Sibal addressed his views on why the best choice for storing such data is smart cards. He said that most biometric readers in India can be beaten by a child using fevicol and wax as opposed to smart cards.
Compromising people’s privacy: You can use Aadhar data to collect some individual’s potential location. For a person travelling alone or on a business trip, this may be unsafe.
While every device in this universe is not fully-proof, it is possible to make certain good decisions to prevent potential attacks on a large biometric data set.