Google has an answer to UIDAI whodunnit

Thousands of smartphone users were stumped on Friday morning to find a toll-free helpline number of UIDAI in their contact list. Following this, the Twitterati went into a tizzy asking each other a simple question -- Where did the number come from, as none of the users seemed to have saved the number on their own.

The Unique Identification Authority of India, however, said that some vested interests were trying to create "unwarranted confusion" in the public mind and clarified that it had not asked any manufacturer or telecom service provider for providing any such facility.

The UIDAI number was visible mostly on Android phones. The issue surfaced late on Thursday night when a French hacker who goes by the alias Elliot Alderson asked people on Twitter if they had the UIDAI helpline in their phonebooks. Within hours, social media was abuzz with people posting screenshots confirming that the UIDAI helpline had been saved in their Android phones, without their knowledge or consent.

The issue raises both fear and concern about how the helpline number made its way into so many phones. One news portal attempted to find the source of the number by starting a BlackBerry device after a factory reset. The portal wanted to check if the number is being pushed by the network operators or through an internet update. Without connecting the device to the internet or inserting a SIM, when the portal

looked for the number -- It was there! As the UIDAI sought to assuage privacy concerns, Google on Friday night admitted that the contact was “inadvertently coded into the SetUp wizard of the Android release”. A spokesperson said, “We are sorry for any concern that this might have caused, and would like to assure everyone that this is not a situation of an unauthorised access of their Android devices. Users can manually delete the number from their devices.’’