Following the case of Cambridge Analytica, there have been doubts arising on the Adhaar information divulged by the population of India. In the Supreme Court though the CEO of UIDAI assured the court that the Adhaar data is unbreachable.
They went so far to say, that it would take the whole universe’s strength to break the Adhaar system’s encryption. The PPT in court was made before a bench constituted by Dipak Misra, AK Sikri, AM Khanwilkar, DY Chandrachud, and Ashok Bhushan. The argument was that Adhaar data is ‘very very secure’. The PPT cover three points– an introduction to Aadhaar, the technology behind Aadhaar and the privacy safeguards in place to protect Aadhaar.
The Supreme Court has been facing cases questioning the privacy of Aadhaar data and the constitutional validity of Aadhaar itself. The fear is that other enrolment centres might be able to take over the information and misuse. Ajay Bhushan Pandey, the CEO of UIDAI said that the UIDAI didn’t share the biometric data with anybody and that when the resident presses the save key the data gets encrypted by the 2048-bit key.
He mentioned that the UIDAI collects data starting from that of newborns whose data is updated twice at 5 years and again when they are 15. He assured that the number allotted to one person once will not be repeated even after they die. The UIDAI can now generate, print and dispatch 1.5 million Aadhaars per day. But in response to the question of privacy, “We are ignorant about the purpose and details of the transactions being undertaken by the people.” This was with regard to linking Aadhaar to various services. But this is the major worry for people. Certain services compulsorily require the linking of Aadhaar. If that is not safe, then neither can the people use services nor can they rely on the Aadhaar, can they?
Pandey said that the data matching software that is stored on UIDAI’s 6000 servers but these are not linked to the internet to eliminate any backdoor access to the data. He stated examples of other software companies like Oracle. But the presentation has remained indecisive and it will resume on March 27th. Whether the data is truly safe or not is yet to be decided.