Biometrics are not discussed much these days because Aadhaar is no longer a strictly biometric id – either at enrollment or in usage.
Biometrics are not collected for toddlers and not considered reliable for under-15s, and that segment was about 30% of the population in the 2011 census. An unknown number have never updated Aadhaar to add biometrics.
Biometric auth fell into disuse with the shift to mobile internet. The government tried strong-arming Apple and Google into taking fingerprint scanners out of the hardware secure zone so they could send scanned fingerprints (minutiae) to UIDAI servers. That didn't work, so they tried coaxing OEMs to make Aadhaar phones with a second fingerprint reader. TRAI – whose chairman 2016-2020 was the ex-UIDAI head – even tried framing it as "device neutrality" borrowing from European app store regulation. None of that worked, so they just moved from biometrics to SMS OTPs for rich people, while continuing to harass poor people for it.
Aadhaar as a unique id was always a galaxy-brained idea when there's no biometrics for children, no removal of dead people, and confusion of uniqueness in an identity scheme vs uniqueness in a much smaller welfare scheme where there's always surplus population who will never notice identity theft.
The only good thing about Aadhaar is the card – it's given people a document that's near-universally accepted. But the Aadhaar card is an organic development that was not part of the original design – where the card was merely meant to be a receipt delivered via the post as a probe to confirm the address – and remains an afterthought in the narrative. Even today you'll find Aadhaar proponents who don't understand how the card is a very different thing from the digital id they associate Aadhaar with.
I should also point out that Aadhaar in fact attempts to capture identity itself, not merely issue a document. The founding management articulated it as a "digital atma (soul)", and the card that people use as a document today was originally meant to be a postal probe to confirm the address by delivering a receipt containing the assigned number (the only way to receive it).
That ridiculous ambition led to their many stupid choices and to further perversion as no other government department could understand what this was and how to use it, so they all invented their own usage processes – with enough loopholes to severely damage its utility as a credential.
The equivalent of a US SSN in India is PAN, the Permanent Account Number issued as a tax identifier, for both individuals and other tax-paying legal persons.
Correct, and my original draft had several paragraphs attempting to explain this, but this article was going into the print edition of the newspaper where they have a very hard limit on space. All of it got dropped.
There are a very large number of people from whom biometrics cannot be collected, or cannot be reliably collected (meaning they change rapidly):
1. Newborn babies (who are all issued Aadhaar without biometrics)
2. Children (rapid change)
3. Old people (fading eyes, wrinkled skin)
4. Workers handling harsh materials (smoothened fingertips)
5. Disabled people (missing fingers)
6. Visually impaired (iris scans won't work)
Biometrics are optional in the design of Aadhaar because all these classes have to be accommodated. But in practice? How do you distinguish between "unable to provide biometrics" and "refusing to provide biometrics with fraudulent intent"? Who makes this determination in each case where biometrics are required?
The design of Aadhaar also imagines that the machine is more reliable than the human authority using the machine, so the human does not need be trusted and government can therefore outsource citizen interactions to non-gazetted officials (ie, cheaper for the govt), who no longer have the authority to override the process when biometrics cannot be used.
This destruction of government accountability is the problem. This is the other half of the Aadhaar project. It's not just an innocent technological system, it's one that was explicitly conceived and funded as a way for one ideology within government (neoliberalism) to dismantle an older socialist ideology, without any thought for what happens to the technologically-excluded.
And what is the post-Aadhaar loss? Nobody knows, because there's no accounting. We're still in the "don't allow critical examination of Aadhaar" era of this regime.
Also, I got my COVID-19 vaccination without Aadhaar. It wasn't asked anywhere. I'm not sure what you're referring to as a connection between them.
The article doesn't make an argument around biometrics. Biometrics are needed even for getting a passport or registering a property purchase, but notice how those are never brought up in any argument around Aadhaar's use of biometrics, whether arguing for or against.
Procedural speed-ups are not because of the technology of Aadhaar, but because of the regulatory regime favouring it. The same fast processes also work without Aadhaar wherever there's been regulatory pushback against mandatory Aadhaar. For instance, video KYC works just fine without Aadhaar, and CKYC with just PAN also does instant KYC.
These are procedural decisions, not technological improvement with Aadhaar. Dig into how it works and you'll find that the technology isn't even where they claim it is.
Not just for privacy, but broken processes and duplicitous technological claims. It doesn't solve the problems that people assume it does. It does solve other problems, which is why there's so much enthusiasm for enforcing it.
But it's hard getting mainstream attention for how these are different sets of problems.
Facebook isn't paying for any of it (apart from the developer screening process and proxy server). They expect their telco partners to bear the expenses, who naturally have no expectation of recovering it from the poor who can't afford to pay, and so don't bother to market the service to them. The telcos market "Free Internet" (and after some backlash "Free Facebook") to urban youth to lure them away from other telcos. FB's own data says 80% of users are switchers, not the newly connected.
Facebook's stated intent is one thing, what's actually happening on the ground is something else.
Said person is an FB employee and director of public policy for India and the region. I guess she and her staff are the only people working out of Delhi, so they took a hotel room. FB's India HQ is down south in Hyderabad.
Nothing in net neutrality prevents you from buying a faster pipe where the provider guarantees priority for your packets using QoS or whatever they please.
Net neutrality only prevents your provider from making this decision on your behalf.
> So Facebook complained that its emails were blocked?
Even better: Facebook complained that Facebook's email infrastructure blocked Facebook from sending further email from Facebook's campaign, and Facebook failed to notice that Facebook's email infrastructure was doing this, so TRAI is now responsible.
Biometrics are not collected for toddlers and not considered reliable for under-15s, and that segment was about 30% of the population in the 2011 census. An unknown number have never updated Aadhaar to add biometrics.
Biometric auth fell into disuse with the shift to mobile internet. The government tried strong-arming Apple and Google into taking fingerprint scanners out of the hardware secure zone so they could send scanned fingerprints (minutiae) to UIDAI servers. That didn't work, so they tried coaxing OEMs to make Aadhaar phones with a second fingerprint reader. TRAI – whose chairman 2016-2020 was the ex-UIDAI head – even tried framing it as "device neutrality" borrowing from European app store regulation. None of that worked, so they just moved from biometrics to SMS OTPs for rich people, while continuing to harass poor people for it.
Aadhaar as a unique id was always a galaxy-brained idea when there's no biometrics for children, no removal of dead people, and confusion of uniqueness in an identity scheme vs uniqueness in a much smaller welfare scheme where there's always surplus population who will never notice identity theft.
The only good thing about Aadhaar is the card – it's given people a document that's near-universally accepted. But the Aadhaar card is an organic development that was not part of the original design – where the card was merely meant to be a receipt delivered via the post as a probe to confirm the address – and remains an afterthought in the narrative. Even today you'll find Aadhaar proponents who don't understand how the card is a very different thing from the digital id they associate Aadhaar with.