03 Jul Critics Call India’s Aadhar System “Deeply Flawed”
India’s Aadhar system was recently hit by a number of critics which said that the national ID program was not only useless in providing welfare or stemming corruption, but also exposed huge amounts of private data to security breaches.
Economist and staunch Aadhar critic Reetika Khera recently wrote in her New York Times editorial that the way India’s Universal ID program authenticates identity depends on a reliable electricity supply to access servers via the internet, which is extremely fickle in parts of India especially up north. She pointed out that applicants have at times been denied of basic necessities due to the failure of one of more steps involved in the authentication process.
The UIDAI was also heavily criticized when it boasted last November that it had not suffered any leaks or breaches. However, the Tribune newspaper found that it was possible to purchase Aadhar numbers for just around $8 from an anonymous seller on WhatsApp.
Source: ZDNet
