Privacy #4: Unification of Databases
In an earlier blog , I had explained why India’s policy on privacy was what it was. To that list, Rahul Matthan adds another point in Privacy 3.0 , namely most people didn’t care. And why didn’t they care? Because, pre-Internet and pre-Aadhar, whatever info the government had on us was scattered across different databases and (physical) filing systems, none of which could “talk” to each other. The fact that they were silo’ed from each other ensured nobody, not even the government, could stitch all the info about an individual together. Until Aadhar came into existence. The BJP government started pushing to have the Aadhar ID added to different databases – from bank accounts to subsidy entitlement to phone numbers… Combine that with the increasing digitization of government records, and suddenly it was very much possible that the government could now stitch together all the info about an individual. Matthan helped frame this concern in an approach paper on privacy for the DoPT...