[By Dru Bloomfield from Scottsdale, Arizona, USA (No TrespassingUploaded by Pieter Kuiper) (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons]
The famous Indian head shake has confused foreigners for ages, making them wonder whether it means a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. The Supreme Court seems to have done that to Indians with its ruling on the use of Aadhaar by the private sector.
The court struck down the parts of Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act, 2016, that allowed private players to use Aadhaar to establish the identity of individuals. The court said, allowing them to do so, based merely on a contract between an individual and a corporate, would impinge on the privacy of the individual—and declared the section unconstitutional. The court appeared to be most concerned about the exploitation of individual data by the private sector, using a platform that was built for a specific reason—to provide government benefits and subsidies efficiently.
The big question now is whether the Supreme Court has closed all doors for the private players to ever use Aadhaar for authentication or eKYC in the future. The judgement is unclear on that part, and that has led to two different interpretations. Some believe that the court has closed all doors for private players. Some believe it hasn’t.
A number of businesses—including Reliance, Airtel, Paytm, Kotak Mahindra Bank—have used Aadhaar authentication and eKYC to sign up customers faster than they could have done the traditional way. Now, they are worried that they no longer can do that.
Some of these businesses, however, think that the Aadhaar platform will be available to them eventually—once a mix of better technology and law reduces the risk of exploitation of an individual’s data by the private sector.