MEITY to all depts: Take precautions while sharing info on websites

‘Publishing identity info is in clear contravention of the provisions of the Aadhaar Act, 2016’

AADHAAR DATA LEAK

IN LIGHT of various Central and state government departments making public Aadhaar information of several users on their websites, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) has written to secretaries of all government departments asking them to sensitise the officials and take precautions while publishing or sharing data on their websites.

“It has come to notice that therehavebeeninstanceswherein personal identity or information of residents, alongwith Aadhaar numbersanddemographicinformation and other sensitive personaldatasuchasbankdetailscollectedbyministries/departments, statedepartmentsforadministration of welfare schemes etc. have been published online,” IT secretary Aruna Sundararajan wrote in the letter dated April 24.

“Publishing identity information i.e. Aadhaar number along with demographic information is in clear contravention of the provisions of the Aadhaar Act, 2016 and constitutes an offence punishable with imprisonment up to three years. Further, publishing of financial information including bank details, being sensitive personaldata,isalsoincontravention of provision under IT Act, 2000 with violations liable to pay damages by way of compensation to persons affected,” she noted.

According to media reports, Aadhaar numbers of hundreds of thousands of pension beneficiaries were published on a state government website, and was followed by Chandigarh's Food and Civilsuppliesdepartmentrevealing the Aadhaar information of beneficiariesofpublicdistribution system.followingsundararajan's letter,variouscentralgovernment ministries have issued advisories to sensitise the officials and the web information managers to comply with the IT Act.

Earlier this month, a report by non-profit organisation The Centre for Internet and Society noted thatupto13.5croreaadhaarnumberswereexposedandwerepublicly available on government websites, with about 10 crore of thesebeinglinkedtobankaccount details. The 27-paged report — Information Security Practices of Aadhaar(orlackthereof):adocumentation of public availability of Aadhaar Numbers with sensitive personal financial information — has collected Aadhaar data from four government portals.

Two of these are national portals: National Social Assistance Programme and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, both under the rural development ministry. The other two studied by the report’sauthors,srinivaskodaliand Amber Sinha, are run by the AP government: a daily online paymentsreportundermgnregaby the state government, and Chandranna Bima Scheme.

“Based on the numbers availableonthewebsiteslookedat,the estimated number of Aadhaar numbers leaked through these 4 portals could be around 130-135 million (13-13.5 crore) and the number of bank accounts numbers leaked at around 100 million (10crore)fromthespecificportals we looked at,” the report stated. ■ Volkswagen on Wednesday rejected investor calls for the carmaker to publish the results of a key investigation into its diesel emissions cheating scandal, saying it was unable to do so for legal reasons.