Hacker News Reader

Comment by mohanmcgeek | Hacker News Reader

why is a single ID card for everything called "survillance".

Sure, I would have preferred if this wasn't so leaky. But can someone tell me how this is surveillance if they're not tracking transactions, conversations or my individual choices (which I assume they are not)

View on HN

A unique ID can act as a common "foreign key" in multiple databases. All IDs earlier to this were purpose-specific (Driving License, PAN etc). But with UID, state governments as well as central governments are building 360 degree views of each citizen - without being subjected to any laws or regulations. Look up how SRDH were build using something called "non-organic seeding" and have continued despite Supreme court coming down on them heavily.

Scroll around among the MANY leaks and you'll stumble across this one:

Public searchable db of pregnant women with addresses, due date and CASTE!

In a society where people are targeted and killed for their caste this is terrifying.

Exposing this data publicly may be a huge problem (I don't know enough about the leaks), but in a society where people want the government to offer welfare benefits based on caste (to address historical inequities), the government necessarily needs to track this data to prevent fraud when doling out welfare (eg. to issue the relevant certificates on birth, which can then be used in various benefit schemes analogous to affirmative action). One can't have it both ways!

One can absolutely have is "both ways" if both is: private data and govt knows your caste. It's the public data that is the problem.

Good sir, if you are required to add an Aadhaar number to an account everywhere, how is it not tracking?

There are now serious proposals to require Aadhaar for social media accounts too.

Some privacy advocates will equate the two things, but personally I find that reductive and misinformative. A centralized identification system can be abused, in the same way a central bank can. Where privacy can impact such a thing is through regulation and separation of concerns. It doesn't look like when this programmer worked on the system that it was purposed for abuse, so I don't know why this Twitter user thought it appropriate to equate the two. Without knowing that, this discussion is basically moot and this Twitter post is typical Twitter mud-slinging.

The real concerning part, to me, is that one person thinks it's okay to make baseless accusations about abuse and named the developer, which can endanger their well-being and their career.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com