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Propaganda? Your 30 minute old account sounds like propaganda too.

We all know we could reduce crime by putting cameras in people's homes. But we don't do that, because there are risks to those kinds of invasive measures.

Aadhar is infrastructure that allows for centralized control of the population. Sometimes that control will be used for good things, like stamping out bribery. But that control can just as easily be used for evil too. And history has shown time and time again that's exactly what happens. I live in Canada, a country filled with refugees of authoritarian regimes. Among my friends I personally know lots of people who have fled those kinds of regimes; I know very few people who have fled countries because of bribery. The latter is annoying and unproductive, but the former is deadly.

That's why you're seeing so much opposition to Aadhar: because it's incredibly dangerous.

edit: better wording

Propaganda? Your 30 minute old account sounds

Do you know the difference between a reader and writer ?

Please Google the difference.

Not every reader on hn for over 5 years needs to have an account.

And, not every old account need not contribute anything useful to the discussion.

Good Day.

you didn't address his main points though.

> We all know we could reduce crime by putting cameras in people's homes. But we don't do that, because there are risks to those kinds of invasive measures.

Surprisingly, in India if people would be against such a measure then only because it would violate the modesty of women, and not because it invades the privacy.

Refer,

https://thewire.in/24713/aadhaar-identification-simplified-m...

The UIDAI has emphasised several times that information related to religion or caste is neither collected nor stored in the Aadhaar database. Applicants and holders are encouraged to look at their Aadhaar to confirm this

Give me a list of 1000 Indian names and I can guess their religion with nearly 95% accuracy.

All the points you say sound like you're 'prepared' or 'rehearsed' to say things like this.

When the next Gujarat riots happen, trust me just a list of people and their addresses would be sufficient enough to figure out where all the Muslims live.

Police forces can be deadly, too; and the alternative to them usually isn't (it's mostly "just" fraud, armed robbery, rape and slave trafficking.) But we prefer to risk authorizing some people to carry deadly weapons around—even knowing it can and does turn out badly sometimes—in order to reduce the prevalence of the things we get from lawlessness.

Aadhar isn't risk-free, but if the majority of the country want it (i.e. if, being informed of the possible consequences, they aren't rioting or impeaching the guy extending it), I feel like that's their choice to make, just like the choice of having police would be.

Also: One of the things about our modern, globalized world, is that any state that's not a military superpower in its own right can't really get away with bootstrapping toward totalitarian autocracy for very long before some concerned state that is a military superpower steps in with a foreign-aided coup. I'm not asserting that that is always a good thing for the world—but, sort of like the "re-insurance" companies backing financial institutions, this arrangement allows smaller states to do "risky" things like using a panopticon to destroy corruption, with a bit of a safety net.

> Aadhar isn't risk-free, but if the majority of the country want it

Thank you for soberly defending the program. I disagree with one of your precedents (specifically, that Indians are informed about the risks they're taking) but agree with your logic.

FWIW I mostly agree with the logic itself too, and I think it's a much better and more honest argument than failing to treat such surveillance systems as dangerous. My disagreement is on the tradeoffs.

> But we prefer to risk authorizing some people to carry deadly weapons around—even knowing it can and does turn out badly sometimes—in order to reduce the prevalence of the things we get from lawlessness.

Yes, and we can get away with that because deadly weapons have an important safety feature: they're operated by individuals who can think for themselves, and themselves resist tyranny. Those weapons are also operated by individuals who are vulnerable to individuals who also have those weapons - notably an argument against drones is they make war too easy, without enough consequences against the agressor.

When those deadly weapons become more powerful - and more likely to be used against civilians rather than military - society is less and less accepting of their existance. That's why biological and chemical weapons are banned, and nuclear weapons are heavily discouraged.

Imagine if we had the ultimate deadly weapon - the ability to kill any individual with a push of the button with 100% success rates, with the owner of that weapon not being vulnerable to it. We'd be terrified of that weapon, because for all the good it might be able to do, in the wrong hands it'd be game over for freedom.

The opposition to Aadhaar simply recognizes that for whatever good it can do, it is a dangerous weapon, one with surprising power. Part of its surprising power is that it gets used to argue for implementation in other states - fighting that weapon needs to start not by arguing against it in your own country, but by arguing against its deployment anywhere.

> Notice a fun fact, Aadhar was introduced before 2013, before the election of 2014. Not many these so called privacy and human rights activists stood up then.

I realize you're probably talking about people in India in this context, not people in the U.S., but I helped write part of this anti-Aadhar post back in 2012:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/09/indias-gargantuan-biom...

In support of your view that some critics have minimal knowledge of India, but also in opposition to your view that critics are motivated by considerations of Indian politics, I don't know which party was in power in India either before or after the 2014 election.

Aadhar started rolling out in 2011 itself, people started enrolling out then only and started getting Aadhar card by post.

Some privacy activists did stood and enquired but did not get much support or voice.

After 6 years who are the people who are creating noise and running from corner to corner ?

Do these people actually care about privacy? Hard to think.

Have these people lost money due to direct benefit scheme? Plausible.

There is no reason to blatantly hate Aadhar unless

- you are a corrupt government employee

- you are a middleman contractor

- you had invested in something and were hoping that the roI will come as a bribe from the common people

- you fear more direct to benefit schemes in future because you have been accumulating wealth by being a middleman all through your life.

-- you are a privacy freak typing on a device assembled in China.

> you are a privacy freak typing on a device assembled in China.

So I see a lot of tensions in this thread between views of privacy advocates in India opposing Aadhar (accused of having some other kind of agenda) and privacy advocates outside India opposing it (accused of not knowing much about India).

Although this thread has included discussions about both Indian and non-Indian opposition, the privacy community outside India is quite relevant because the original article is a (U.S.-based) Mozilla post criticizing Aadhar.

I'm a privacy advocate outside India accused of not knowing much about India, to which I can readily confess. I have unfortunately not yet had the opportunity to visit India. As I said, I don't know which party was in power when Aadhar was first developed, nor do I know which party is in power now, nor have I witnessed the situation of the rural communities often described as the biggest Aadhar beneficiaries.

I do find it sad that the notion of hypocrisy or disproportionate concern has taken on such a high profile in this thread.

Like you said, I am typing this on a device assembled in China. I've thought about the possibility that the Chinese state (in whose territory this device was shipped), the American state (through those territory this device was shipped and in whose territory its CPU was designed), or the Swedish, Dutch, German, Swiss, Italian, Portuguese, Brazilian, Singaporean, Taiwanese, British, or Chinese states, among others (through those territory I've carried this device), may have used their access to backdoor it somehow.

I find these possibilities deeply tragic. I'm very grateful that so many people around the world are working to expose, detect, and fight back against the ways in which governments may tamper with our devices. People who do that are my heroes, and I hope their community will grow and grow. If a manufacturer can show how it's better-protected its users against supply chain attacks, I will be really excited to consider its products.

The track record of power-centralising anti-corruption projects is poor. This is because corruption is a sign of weak or ineffective institutions. Institutions which can't stop bribery probably can't prevent the next guy from e.g. zeroing out the bank accounts of vulnerable populations who voted against him or are to the detriment of a crony.

We had Nehru Firoz Khan dynasty, their relatives, their friends, at premier positions of adminstration, politics, law enforcement for 60 years.

They lacked the motive to actually establish strong and performance oriented institutions, hence corruption became a daily routine in India.

Slowly, some(not all) things are progressing.

Using Aadhar to directly transfer the money to exact recipient has rattled those who had enjoyed or felt entitled to waste the subsidiaries or sell the subsidiaries items in outer market + then ask the government for extra subsidiaries again and again and again.

>Not many these so called privacy and human rights activists stood up then.

The current PM Modi himself criticized it then : https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/453543852175925248?l...

Coincidence?

He asked questions about implementation.

..and complained when he didn't receive any answers from the government in power and now that his Government is in power, not only is it also refusing to answer questions but is also targeting the people who ask similar questions.[1]

[1] Google for CIS and Aadhaar leaks

Yes, but the old lady in the village will have a problem with it when it is used to marginalize and discriminate against her.

The riots in 1984 and in 2001 showed us how voter lists can, and will, be misused by people in power to their own benefit.

You mean the Cincinnati riots of 2001 I can clearly see why USA should not have voter lists /s

The riots happened in 2002 and NOT 2001 (at least get the year right), and unless you are arguing abolishing voter lists, or have a specific argument that involves Aadhar. I don't see how this is in anyway relevant to this discussion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_riots_of_2001

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_riots

Nice deflection! Are you disagreeing that voter lists were used in 2001 to discriminate against muslims? Do we have any laws preventing that from happening with aadhar data?

Do you even understand how Aadhar works?

You made a claim.

Can you prove that using an Aadhar number one can get the religion of a person?

If you can identify someone, it's easy to link it to data that identifies their religion.

Given a persons name you can guess with fairly reasonable accuracy what their religion is.

My folks also loved aadhar because of the cheap gas. Not because of bribes ( i guess its not an issue in Kerala) but because the government would give subsidy to those who had aadhar cards. So people sold their privacy to the govt, in exchange for cheap gas.

How exactly is a biometric ID going to prevent them demanding bribes?