Ever since its inception, Aadhaar has been consistently in the news for breach of data and other privacy concerns, even though the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) the nodal agency of the world's biggest biometric database continues to vouch for is security.?
One of the biggest concerns many right to privacy advocates had raised is how private companies including telecom service providers, banks payment wallets and even e-commerce site have been collecting Aadhaar data of users in the name of KYC compliance.
BCCL
Despite a Supreme Court order making it clear that Aadhaar cannot be mandatory for services like new mobile connection and bank accounts, companies still continue to demand it from users.
Even as this continues a revelation by UIDAI that a private tech company had access to over Aadhaar data and Voter ID? of 7.82 crore individuals from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana has raised some serious questions.
BCCL
UIDAI on Saturday filed a police complaint against a technology firm IT Grids (India) alleging it was in possession of Aadhaar data of over 7.8 crore residents of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.?
What makes the entire episode even murkier is that IT Grids is the same company that Andhra CM Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam Party (TDP) hired to develop its app, Seva Mitra.
IT Grids reportedly used its access to Seva Mitra in which users were asked to provide their Aadhaar deals to verify beneficiaries of welfare schemes.
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The company was storing the data in a removable storage device which is a violation of the Aadhaar Act.?
According to forensic officials, the structure and size of the database in possession of IT Grids was similar to that of UIDAI.
UIDAI in its complaint stated that IT Grids could have used the Aadhaar data for voter profiling of crores of users in the two states.