Aadhaar card issuing body: Personal info can’t be hacked

The Aadhaar card that is being issued nationwide

By Christopher Isaac

BANGALORE (Aug. 30)—The lack of a legal system to safeguard personal data will not undermine the government’s scheme to issue biometric identification cards nationwide, according to an official at the body managing the scheme.

The Unique Identification Authority of India is issuing the biometric identification across the country, even though India does not have a comprehensive online data protection law.

But according to the UIDAI, the data collected by it for the so-called Aadhaar cards being issued is safe from hackers. The cards began to be issued in Bangalore on Aug. 17.

K.K. Sharma, assistant director general at the UIDAI said, “There is no question of information being hacked because everything is done offline.”

The information, Sharma said, is fed into the UIDAI’s software at enrollment centers, and then sent via hard disk or pen drive to the city’s main data center.

Dushyant Chakravorty, a corporate executive who recently applied for an Aadhar card, said he was not worried about the safety of his personal data.

“They only take a biometric and retina scan, along with your address and ID proof,” Dushyant said. “I only think twice about giving away my credit card number or phone number online.”

Meanwhile, the government still has not passed the Personal Data Protection Bill proposed by the Rajya Sabha upper house of Parliament in 2006.

Sunayana Basu, a lawyer specializing in cyber law and crime, believes the UIDAI will be exempt from the data protection bill.

“The UIDAI is guided by government policies and rules,” said Sunayana. “We will have to wait for the bill to be passed to scrutinize it [to see whether the UIDAI is covered by the law].”

Shankar Maruwada, head of communications at the UIDAI, said: “The information we collect is minimal. And even though the data is offline, no one can get information from the data center because we have disabled that feature [to prevent the retrieval of information using memory devices].”

When asked about the data privacy laws in India, Shankar said the UIDAI was pushing the government to pass stricter privacy laws to protect online data.