Internet companies, such as Amazon, are refusing to offer services in India without proof of identity through Aadhaar, the biometric card that every Indian citizen has been forced to obtain by the government. Amazon is an American company based at Seattle. Internet firms, Facebook and Google, are accused of collecting personal information about their users. Google has faced accusations of violating privacy of its users. Now US companies can add our fingerprints to their databases. What about Indian companies? They should be safe since they hold information within the nation's borders. Amazon's Indian competitor, Flipkart, is based in Singapore, and the parent company of Paytm, One97 Communications, has received huge contributions from Alibaba and Ant Financial. Paytm hopes to sign up half the population of India on its mobile wallet platform. These are big companies so they will take care to protect personal information of their users. "Google has detected an app 'Tizi', which has been stealing information from call records and also from social media apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, and also takes pictures from mobile phones without even displaying them on screen of the device," was a news report. Most people use smartphones for online transactions, so when they were buying online using their Aadhaar number 'Tizi' was busy collecting this information along with the users' names, addresses and photographs. Government agents claim that Aadhaar is completely secure from hacking. Perhaps, they are right, When the whole world can easily obtain our numbers and fingerprints from our phones there is no need to hack into the main server storing the information. "In any kind of system, the basic core will always be secure, but any such core system has to interact with a larger ecosystem and this ecosystem always bring the problem to the table," said V Godse, Director of Data Security Council of India. In the case of Aadhaar the "larger ecosystem" seems to include the whole world. Since the government has mandated that all phone and bank accounts must be linked with Aadhaar, Bharti Airtel has turned it around by surreptitiously signing people to Airtel Payments Bank while linking their phone numbers to Aadhaar. Estonia and Spain faced problems of hacking with Digital ID cards, and in India, where vast numbers are illiterate and live in remote places, many will pay with their lives. Only a few months back the CEO of a security firm in Sweden went bankrupt when someone took out a huge loan with his stolen identity. Gandhi was called a "half-naked fakir" by Winston Churchill, and Gandhi is the Father of the Nation. Now all citizens of India are fully naked. No need to be ashamed, is there?
No comments:
Post a Comment