Raising major privacy concerns truck loads of Aadhaar numbers and other personal details of individuals are being leaked. Yesterday, it was revealed that the personal details over one millions Aadhaar subscribers were leaked on a website run by the Jharkhand Directorate of Social Security.
Today, it is reported that the Aadhar numbers and other personal details of Public Distribution System (PDS) users of Chandigarh government were displayed on its website and in another incident plenty of aadhaar numbers are displayed on the central government’s Ministry of Water and Sanitation’s website (Swacch Bharat Mission). Both the websites are hosted by National Informatics Centre.
In Jharkhand, most of the vulnerable are senior citizens, who are beneficiaries of the state’s old-age pension scheme. Jharkhand has 1.6 million pensioners, among whom 1.4 million have reportedly seeded their Aadhaar cards for direct transfer of the monthly pension into their accounts. In the security violation, personal details such as name and bank account number were revealed for a bulk of these users.
According to Section 29 (4) of the Aadhaar Act, publishing Aadhar numbers of consumers is illegal.
The Supreme Court, along with other cyber security agencies, have expressed repeated concerns over the shoddy security features of Aadhaar and asked the State not to make it mandatory for citizens to avail themselves of benefits. However, the emphasis, in the last few months, have been on the contrary — to link every major aspect of a citizen’s life to Aadhaar, including the filing of tax returns.