Aadhaar's Dr Security and Mr Scale Problem

With security and privacy pulling it to one side and scale and utility to the other, Aadhaar will continue to remain conflicted. And from that conflict, breaches will keep emerging

The police case against Ola-owned Qarth Technologies is a legal band-aid on a technological wound

Aadhaar's core is well secured, and that's good

But it's periphery is increasingly looking like the Wild West

Almost all breaches till now have happened at the periphery. And the ones yet to happen too

On 28 July, newspapers reported that UIDAI, the state-owned agency that manages India’s unique identity project, Aadhaar, had filed a police complaint against Qarth Technologies, a company that was acquired in 2016 by Ola, India’s largest ride-sharing platform.

UIDAI accused Qarth’s founders of illegally accessing the Aadhaar data for all of 2017. And yet strangely, UIDAI also maintained that “there has been no breach, no leakage and no theft of data.”

The victimless crime wasn’t the first, and it won’t be the last. Because Aadhaar’s privacy and security goals are in conflict with its commerce and identity ambitions.

AUTHOR

Anand Venkatanarayanan

Anand V is a Senior Engineer at NetApp India Private Limited. He was mostly into Data Security and recently (2+ years) has taken an interest in application and end point security. He is a known privacy buff and mistakenly believes that everyone should care about their privacy.

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