Is your Privacy Safe with Aadhaar?: An Open Discussion

The Aadhaar project is the world's largest national identity project, launched by Government of India in 2009, which seeks to collect biometric and demographic data of residents and store this information in a centralised database. To date, more than approximate 1.1 billion users have enrolled for Aadhaar/ in this system, and the government has spent at least 1000 million USD on this project. Basically, this project is completely free for its citizens/ people. No agency/ centre require money for issuing Aadhaar (as first time). But recently/ in the last five years, several issues like privacy and security have emerged with this project. This work examines these issues from a Computer Science perspective and provides several valuable suggestions (needed to be done/ overcome in near future). Also, this work investigates the privacy and security issues of Aadhaar from a technology point of view. Our analysis suggests that privacy protection in Aadhaar will require a) an independent third party that can play the role of an online auditor, b) study of several modern tools and techniques from computer science, and c) strong legal and policy frameworks that can address the specifics of authentication and identification in a modern digital setting. Aadhaar is premised on the infallibility and security of an individual's biometric data, i.e., her fingerprints and iris scans. However, this is only a myth because section 28(5) of the Aadhaar Act refuses an individual access to the biometric data that act as core of his/ her unique ID. In summary, this paper describes a detail discussion and reaches on a result that how Aadhaar can be good or bad for people of India.