India has won the battle for a right to privacy, War on the Aadhar remains!!

swatkats

swatkats

Skilled
August 24 will go down in history as the day that India’s Supreme Court ruled that privacy is a fundamental right for its citizens. If you care to read it, here’s the 547-page judgment in its entirety (mirrors to the PDF on Google Drive and Dropbox).

That’s a huge win for the country’s people, particularly in the face of the ever-widening net of Aadhaar, the nationwide biometric database meant to document every citizen with the primary objective of ensuring they can access government services.

As I mentioned in previous stories, Aadhaar is problematic in its current implementation; the government is overconfident about how secure this system is (while failing to acknowledge that it’s one of the largest single targets for hackers in history), and it’s unnecessarily being made mandatory for essential private services.

By linking your accounts to a single ID, Aadhaar creates a web of data points that could be used to profile or track people. The fact that all this information exists poses a threat to citizens – it could be the current or next government, or even malicious actors.

As Medianama pointed out, what makes matters worse is that the Aadhaar Act explicitly denies citizens the right to go to court to seek damages for the release of their personal data. Only the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) – the agency in charge of Aadhaar – can sue the government in such cases. So much for protecting your privacy.

These are some of the issues with Aadhaar that need to be addressed as India closes in on its goal of IDing every citizen in the country. The privacy ruling isn’t a silver bullet that will take down the Aadhaar system, but it could help take discourse and legal cases forward with regards to ensuring that people have control over what sort of data they share and how it’s used. Godspeed, India.


Source: https://thenextweb.com/in/2017/08/2...acy-now-for-the-war-on-aadhaar/#.tnw_BseqNe6s
 
One battle has been won. The war remains...

The next one (aadhaar) is crucial. Let's hope for the best.
 
The good and the bad of the privacy ruling

The system of common law is based on precedent. Judges are bound to consider past judgments and apply them to disputes that come before them in the future. They are only permitted to diverge the chain of historical decisions if it is possible to sufficiently distinguish—in fact or principle—from the available precedents. Our law is, therefore, not so much a monolith handed to us by our founding fathers as an edifice constructed brick-by-brick through an incremental series of decisions—each one based on the judgements that preceded it but in aggregate a composite, well-integrated whole. Common law takes shape in this manner, organically evolving to accommodate new technologies and social mores while remaining consistent with the past from which it arose.

The fundamental right to privacy has been developed by the courts in this manner for over 60 years. The reason the Supreme Court had to take the effort to gather nine judges together to rule on whether or not we have a fundamental right to privacy was because of a minor inconsistency that had crept into the chain of decisions over 50 years ago and remained, till last Friday, unresolved.

It all began when the attorney general of India, while defending the Aadhaar project, argued that the Constitution does not include within it a fundamental right to privacy. He based his conclusion on two cases decided by the Supreme Court—one, MP Sharma v. Satish Chandra, decided by an eight-judge bench in 1954 and the other, Kharak Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh, by six judges in 1962. Both cases had held, under different circumstances, that the Constitution of India does not specifically protect the right to privacy. In the 55 years that have passed since these cases were decided, there hasn’t been a larger bench of Supreme Court that has considered this issue, and therefore, by sheer weight of numbers, these judgements bound us. It would take nine judges to set this straight.

When you get into the weeds, MP Sharma dealt with a completely unrelated issue—the right against self-incrimination. While it did mention the right to privacy in passing, these comments were stray observations at best. Kharak Singh, on the other hand, was a confusing decision that held, on the one hand, that the intrusion into a person’s home is a violation of liberty (relying on a US judgement on the right to privacy), but on the other hand went on to say that there was no right to privacy contained in our Constitution.



Read more: http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/CTE...e-good-and-the-bad-of-the-privacy-ruling.html
 
toocool6600 said:
People are not excited in india

Because it's India
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People are blind, deaf and stupid. BJP Supporters were busy dissing the judges and calling them corrupted for trying to preserve their rights and going against the govt. After BJP setup a press conference and declared that they have always supported right to privacy and that all the crap that the AG put out in court (about govt having ownership of peoples bodies and people not having a right to them) were just talking points for the court, the supporters are confused about how to deal with the situation.
 
WikiLeaks hints at CIA access to India's national ID card database

WikiLeaks on Friday published reports that suggested the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is using technology provider Cross Match Technologies to discreetly extract Aadhaar data.

"The OTS (Office of Technical Services), a branch within the CIA, has a biometric collection system that is provided to liaison services around the world — with the expectation for sharing of the biometric takes collected on the systems. But this 'voluntary sharing' obviously does not work or is considered insufficient by the CIA, because ExpressLane is a covert information collection tool that is used by the CIA to secretly exfiltrate data collections from such systems provided to liaison services," WikiLeaks said on its website.


:eek::eek::eek:
 
I knew this long back when Aadhar Card was being implemented. This is why Aadhar Card is Bad for every Indian Citizen. Its must be stopped.
 
Foreign Firms Granted Full Access To Classified Aadhaar Data! RTI Reply Reveals

Col. Matthew Thomas from Bengaluru is one of the parties in the ongoing Right to Privacy case, being heard in Supreme Court. Earlier, the apex court had declared that Right to Privacy is a fundamental right of every Indian.

For this case, Col. Matthew had filed a RTI request, asking the details about contract given by UIDAI to private firms for collecting Aadhaar data.

As per the reply received under RTI, the Aadhaar contract has given full access to classified data of Indians, to the private firms based out of India.

In fact, the contract requests these companies to store the data for 7 full years as well.


http://trak.in/tags/business/2017/08/30/aadhaar-data-full-access/
 
swatkats said:
Foreign Firms Granted Full Access To Classified Aadhaar Data! RTI Reply Reveals

Col. Matthew Thomas from Bengaluru is one of the parties in the ongoing Right to Privacy case, being heard in Supreme Court. Earlier, the apex court had declared that Right to Privacy is a fundamental right of every Indian.

For this case, Col. Matthew had filed a RTI request, asking the details about contract given by UIDAI to private firms for collecting Aadhaar data.

As per the reply received under RTI, the Aadhaar contract has given full access to classified data of Indians, to the private firms based out of India.

In fact, the contract requests these companies to store the data for 7 full years as well.


http://trak.in/tags/business/2017/08/30/aadhaar-data-full-access/
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OMG...it just reiterates the fact that we are not treated as citizens but merely as a subject. Imagine if we did not have the voting power probably those who do not fall in line wold have been made to disappear. Our democracy seems like more glorified banana republic.
 
swatkats said:
Foreign Firms Granted Full Access To Classified Aadhaar Data! RTI Reply Reveals
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I'm not really a critic of our govt but this is just insulting if it is true.
You are literally selling your Whole population's privacy.
Just imagine giving personal details of +1 billion population to targeted ad services.
With how ridiculous our system is im sure one day our whole database will be on dark net for few shekels.
 
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