You Don't Need To Link Your Aadhaar Everywhere, Making Its Use Completely Voluntary

If you're someone who's irritated by everyone from your bank to payment wallet forcing you to link your Aadhaar details to establish your identity, please do not skip reading this report.

There's good news for citizens of India thanks to a Lok Sabha session yesterday, where it passed an amendment to make Aadhaar voluntary.

- Called the 'Aadhaar and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2019', it was passed by a voice vote at a Lok Sabha session yesterday.

- Instead of forcing people to provide an Aadhaar card before allowing them to open a bank account or procure a mobile number, the Bill will allow people to choose whether they'd prefer a different form of KYC (Know Your Customer) identification.

- Once it's passed by the Rajya Sabha, the Bill will replace an ordinance issued in March with the same purpose.

- "The proposed amendment is strictly in compliance with the Supreme Court's order," Prasad said. "It is completely voluntary. The voluntary nature of compliance is based upon the consent of the owner of Aadhaar," Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

- The only time you can be compelled to share your Aadhaar data is by court order or when the government claims a threat to national security is involved.

Reuters

- "The private entities are exempted from taking any biometrics, Aadhaar number, etc and if they do, they can go to jail and a penalty of Rs 1 crore can also be imposed subsequently. Therefore, all these safeguards, whereby they are prohibited from violating the regime, have been in place," he added.

- So what about for those people that may have already been forced to comply and submit their Aadhaar data for verification to a bank or telco? Unfortunately, there's no rollback for them yet.

- Some members did raise the issue of the right to be forgotten, but Prasad gave no ground. "The right to be forgotten is a concept which flows from the data protection laws. But we need to also acknowledge that the right to be forgotten is a concept which is still evolving. The norms are still to be concretised globally."

- Essentially, you can't force any private entities with whom you've verified your Aadhaar details to delete your data, not yet anyway.

- Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad meanwhile has continued to assure both lawmakers and the general public that there are adequate safeguards in place to prevent the misuse of data by government or private entities.

- All Ravi Shankar Prasad was willing to offer was that a Data Protection Law is currently a "work in progress".