Biometric Identification with Aadhaar

The program was rolled out in 2016 with a hope to profile a digital identity of each and every Indian citizen. Given a lot of population of India is illiterate, the purpose of Aadhaar is to allow everyone access to government services by using a digital identity clubbed with thumb impression. Moreover, it was assured that it will tackle the problems like corruption, terrorism, bribery so on and so forth. In May 2018, Anmol Somanchi from The Wire published an article deciphering various ways in which Aadhaar is proving to be more harmful than useful.

The article presented that by conducting Google search with keywords “Fake”, “Forged”, “fraud”, “scam” followed by the word “Aadhaar”, yielded around hundred cases of fake or forged Aadhar from all over India, thirty-one of which were from 2018 alone. The number of these cases are an under-representation given the fact that the search was limited to only English Media outlets. The author has presented, in the same article, a spreadsheet detailing each one of these frauds.

A detailed analysis of the spreadsheet highlights the following purposes for which Aadhaar is usually compromised – casting votes, getting loans, obtaining passports, performing lad transfers etc.

Most of these activities are carried out in the form of “Identity Theft” – by altering details of genuine people with fake information (names, photos etc.). A third of the cases reported were about rackets where fake or forged Aadhaar were being mass-produced using rudimentary infrastructure and resources. In one of the sophisticated rackets, a gang in Uttar Pradesh, India was caught generating Aadhaar for fictitious people by cloning the fingerprints of Aadhaar enrollment operators.

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Going forward, the article talks about specific cases of fraud:

Upon revealing his Aadhaar one-time-password (OTP) to crooks over the phone, a. Parliament member lost Rs 27,000.

In another case, fraudsters tricked regular people into revealing their Aadhaar one-time-password (OTP) on. The pretext of linking it to their Personal Account Numbers or PAN (Financial Transaction Tracker issued by Income Tax Department). Later on, the OTP’s were used to change the originally linked mobile phone numbers in the Aadhaar Card Database. Moving beyond the cases of fake and forged uses, there have been reports about data leaks. Aman Sethi of Huffington Post mentions the efforts of a security researcher who identified an online dashboard of the Andhra Pradesh government.

The web dashboard was reportedly displaying Aadhaar numbers publicly. Further, it also displayed the information linked to each individual Aadhaar number such as home addresses and bank details. If that was not it, the dashboard also allowed precise mapping of latitudes and longitudes of households which were geo-mapped by caste and religion. This certainly raises some grave implications of Aadhaar on privacy. If this was not enough, a petition filed by Justice (Retd) KS Puttaswamy to the Supreme Court of India suggest that the infrastructure that is used for biometrics and iris scanning has been reported to have failure rates of up to 6% and 8.5% respectively.

Explain what ethical issues it raises (you can select one or two even if there are more) and your reasons for thinking these are ethical concerns.

Various ethical concerns which an unsecured database as big as Aadhaar raises are:

1. Creation of fake identities which can be used to give rise to terrorism activities (given the history of the country)
2. increase corruption in politics since today, Aadhaar is considered as ground-truth to estimate anyone’s identity and therefore the population of India
3. Lack of Digital Awareness and Literacy can lead to exploitation of masses

• Physical Infrastructure is not yet fully developed and often things like Camera/Printer etc. input false values with the machine operator not trained enough to correct these errors. Imagine someone capturing your photo for the records with a cheap-made camera which ends up capturing a blurry image or image of someone else?
• Aadhaar is still very new and therefore people are unaware about use cases. Some POS require Biometric identification to accept Aadhaar as a proof while most others only rely on paper-based number (since that is how India has been functioning for quite a long time).
• A lack of awareness of digital registration system is also giving rise to bribery. I recently visited India to update my phone number on my Aadhaar card. The person responsible asked me for a fee stating that is a maintenance fee. The Aadhaar mandate states that updating Aadhaar card is free of cost, but these middlemen are utilizing the lack of awareness among the public about Digital Registration to charge hefty amounts.

Simplistic Algorithm & cheaply maintained software

Aadhaar works on a simple algorithm called “Verhoeff algorithm” which has been deemed easy to be broken by hackers o Moreover, the setup of POS for registration in itself is problematic. The UIDAI has tied up with banks across the nation to help facilitate registration/correction process.

Each of these banks (thousands of them) run local database copies with almost no layers of security. Even a physical bribery at the bank can reveal a lot of information let alone digital hacking

Identity Theft and Compromise:

• A lot of fake calls and random requests have ended up in people losing money, property, important documents like passport etc.
• A major ethical issue is that Aadhaar card is QR code based and given that a lot of people are simply using the paper format, it is easy to replicate and take advantage of.
• Interestingly enough, the alleged involvement of Cambridge Analytica in Aadhaar Act has been pointed out by the Supreme Court of India which can have far-reaching consequences.

Describe an objection someone might raise either against your claim that there is an ethical issue or against the particular ethical concern that you have. Despite everything going on with Aadhaar card, the Indian Government thinks it is still a safe and reliable digital identity option for Indian Citizens. The underlying hypothesis behind the creation of Aadhaar given by the Indian government is that it is robust compared to other national identities in that it is not easily faked or forged. The government officials have repeatedly argued that Aadhaar will help fight the ills in the society such as banking frauds and terrorism by making sure that only “veritable” people get access to various banking and mobile-based services.

For the cases discussed and other similar cases, the usual response from the government has been nonchalant. They have discarded all the reports out there stating that it is not possible for fraudsters to generate “authentic” Aadhaar numbers.