A report in Chandigarh-based Tribune newspaper claims that the personal information of Indians such as photographs, thumbprints, retina scans and other identifying details, stored in the world’s largest biometric database, can be bought online for less than £6.
According to The Guardian, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which administers the Aadhaar system, said it appeared the newspaper had accessed only limited details through a search facility that had been made available to government officials.
The newspaper report said anonymous people in WhatsApp groups were charging 500 rupees (£5.82) for the details of an account that allowed access to information from the Aadhaar database. This included a person’s name, home and email addresses, photographs and phone numbers.
More than 200 government websites were revealed in November to have published the Aadhaar numbers of citizens along with the names, addresses and bank details. UIDAI said that in that case the information had been inadvertently published by other government departments and was removed as soon as the breach became apparent, reported The Guardian.
Aadhaar workers have spent the past four years traversing India taking the names and photographs and scanning the eyeballs and thumbs of more than a billion people. But critics argue that the benefits of Aadhaar are overblown and that such an enormous and potentially lucrative database can never be fully secured.
In August, the supreme court ruled that privacy was a fundamental right guaranteed by the Indian constitution, a decision legal analysts predict could leave parts of the Aadhaar programme vulnerable to legal challenge, reported The Guardian.
In his speech at Howdy Modi, Indian Prime Minister said, “data is the new oil… new gold”. He further said that the cheapest source of data is India.
