AADHAAR FOR MOBILE PHONES
Mobile phone subscribers have lately been receiving repeated messages from their service providers, asking them to ‘re-verify’ themselves with their Aadhaar numbers. This is the result of new regulation—telecom companies are scrambling to comply with a directive from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) issued in March, asking telecom companies to re-verify their subscribers using the Aadhaar-based e-KYC (an online ‘know your customer’ process). The DoT directive follows a Supreme Court diktat in February asking it to verify the addresses of all new
and existing mobile subscribers by February 2018. The move, ostensibly, is to weed out ‘fake’ subscribers.
For new customers, this is all the more painful as it means they cannot own a mobile phone without having an Aadhaar number. “First of all, who is a ‘fake’ user?” asks Mahesh Murthy, a venture capitalist and marketer. “Second, what is to stop someone from asking their helpers to get SIM cards using their details and then borrowing their helper’s SIM cards? The real reason for this, I would imagine, is to create a deep surveillance state where citizens have no privacy,” he says.
A big concern is to have to share private information for a most commonplace service—mobile communication— without any assurances that the data will be safe. There was a recent scare involving the personal data of 100 million subscribers of Reliance Jio, the latest telecom entrant, after a website put up what appeared to be their names and addresses. Jio, which enrolled most of its subscribers through the e-KYC process, claimed that the data on the website was ‘unauthentic’. The government is seeking more details from Jio on the breach, which also saw a young computer science dropout being arrested.
A Bengaluru-based expert in privacy law, who requested not to be named, says the whole premise of making Aadhaar details mandatory to purchase a SIM card is flawed. “In Europe, you can buy SIM cards from vending machines, but that does not mean they are not concerned about security,” he says. Moreover, even if e-KYC allows for faster verification, the process should have followed the policy of ‘data minimisation’. Not everyone should get access to all of a person’s data.
Murthy says mobile subscribers are being told what to do, but not why it’s being done. “Think about this: now there is a database that connects your mobile phone number to your Aadhaar number to your PAN number to your purchases using GST. This means that just knowing your number can allow anyone who has access to the database to see your income tax records,” he says. Moreover, if Aadhaar cards are made mandatory for SIM card purchases, what about the thousands of non-resident Indians who don’t have Aadhaar cards? Will they now lose their Indian SIM cards?
Downplaying the Jio incident, Rajan Mathews, director general, COAI (Cellular Operators Association of India), said even without Aadhaar numbers, fraudsters could obtain the names and addresses of subscribers. “The government has assured us the Aadhaar data is secure,” he said, putting the onus of security on customers. Asked if the move to link Aadhaar with mobile phones would impact subscriber additions, Mathews said it wouldn’t. “The government says that over 1 billion Aadhaar cards have been issued, covering 99 per cent of the population.” Questions abound, but users will have little choice but to get their mobile numbers ‘re-verified’.
The reason, many fear, is to create a deep surveillance state where citizens have no privacy