[HN Gopher] Life without Aadhaar
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Life without Aadhaar
Author : walterbell
Score : 63 points
Date : 2024-09-21 09:49 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.deccanherald.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.deccanherald.com)
| thisislife2 wrote:
| Good article about the woes in India to preserve privacy amidst
| the combined onslaught of government surveillance and
| surveillance capitalism. My mother's pension account was frozen
| for many months for not providing her Adhaar Id. I had to finally
| threaten legal action to ensure she could access her bank account
| again. We were lucky that we were well-off and my mother could
| live without her pension for many months, but such actions can
| make the financially-constrained really desperate.
| adipandas wrote:
| https://uidai.gov.in/en/my-aadhaar/about-your-aadhaar/aadhaa...
|
| This is what I referred. But never come across a situation where
| it was followed. Many cases were not progressing without aadhaar.
| pkphilip wrote:
| The Indian government is extremely duplicitous when it comes to
| AADHAR. On the one hand they claim it is not mandatory (to
| comply with the supreme court judgement no this) but on the
| other hand they make it impossible to get by without AADHAR.
|
| Even private institutions use this duplicity to force AADHAR on
| everyone.
|
| Sources: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/the-
| aadhaar-confu...
| ramshanker wrote:
| Let's accept this, AADHAR is the most friction-less process
| to get things done. And Private Institutions aren't going to
| spend extra to satisfy some errant ideology.
| devsda wrote:
| Forget financial transactions. You cannot book a temple visit
| online without giving aadhaar details of all devotees.
|
| That's how ridiculously it is used when it is supposed to be
| used only in activities related to "consolidated fund of
| India".
| OutOfHere wrote:
| India is an expert at imposing oppressive laws and policies
| without thinking through them much.
| alephnerd wrote:
| What is the alternative for providing direct benefits without
| lossage?
|
| A centralized ID makes it easier to verify identity, given that
| alternative local systems of identification were easily
| falsified and used to siphon money away from welfare programs
| by local politicians of all parties.
|
| Before Aadhaar, to get your PAN card you often had to deal with
| your local panchayat, and that was often a compromised method
| with local panchayat functionaries requiring bribes or straight
| up ignoring individuals.
|
| Furthermore, because the local level was so compromised, it was
| easy to create either fake IDs which was often used for
| siphoning funds.
|
| Digital/Identity Libertarianism is a Veblen good when the
| absolute majority of the population is dependent on government
| benefits and subsidies.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| There is no alternative afaik. The issues however are:
|
| 1. Friction in getting the card in the first place,
| especially in cases that are out of the ordinary.
|
| 2. Extensive and mandatory use of the card for routine non-
| governmental things that are not benefits or bank accounts.
| This is more pervasive than one may realize.
| stackskipton wrote:
| >2. Extensive and mandatory use of the card for routine
| non-governmental things that are not benefits or bank
| accounts. This is more pervasive than one may realize.
|
| This is common in almost every country that has central ID
| system. Businesses want easy way to track someone using
| Primary Key that doesn't change. It's even bigger benefit
| to business if it's Primary Key that's same across all
| businesses.
|
| Only way to prevent it is having laws that ban use of the
| number in business dealings but few countries have those
| laws.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| > This is common in almost every country that has central
| ID system.
|
| Not true. The US has a Social Security Number but it is
| not needed for everyday business use. It is not needed
| for getting a cell phone number, for example. In India,
| the Aadhaa card is needed for getting a cell phone
| number.
| stackskipton wrote:
| It's required for getting postpaid cellular plan. It's
| also required to do banking so credit/debit card you give
| them, they likely can use that to backtrack.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It 's required for getting postpaid cellular plan._
|
| Nope. I got a new cellular device on a national carrier
| last year without giving up my SSN.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Plan, not device. If you have a plan, they have your SSN
| already and ran soft credit check likely when you bought
| your device.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Biggest one is probably health insurance. I'd be
| surprised if you can get any (private, employer-
| sponsored, ACA exchange, Medicaid, Medicare) health
| insurance plan without an SSN. Medicare at least makes
| sense since it is administered by the Social Security
| Administration.
| kelipso wrote:
| Don't know the details but the cell phone number thing is
| due to terrorism reasons and mandated by the government,
| not due to individual businesses choosing to. Used to be
| you could just buy sim cards using cash.
| alephnerd wrote:
| The US doesn't actually have a central ID system.
|
| SSA is de facto used as one, but it isn't actually
| mandated.
|
| The Aadhaar system is based on Malaysia and Singapore's
| National Registration ID Card (MyKad/IC respectively)
| system, as both countries had similar needs to India's
| for distributing benefits and validating identity.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Now the real fun begins when the primary key almost never
| changes, and is considered never-changing by most
| businesses and computer systems, but there is an
| extremely small number of cases when it does, in fact,
| change.
|
| Poland is like that for example. Our PESEL number encodes
| gender by whether one of the digits is odd or even.
| People with a legally-sanctioned gender change get a new
| PESEL, and a lot of systems aren't prepared for that.
|
| The Gender change process here is extremely long and
| arduous, and the number of transgender people was very
| low until recently, so most institutions weren't prepared
| to deal with it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > What is the alternative for providing direct benefits
| without lossage?
|
| Accept the lossage. No system is foolproof, follow the Pareto
| principle and that's it.
|
| Unfortunately that one is hard to sell to voters, especially
| as "we're going to eradicate fraud" is a very popular
| platform of conservative/authoritarian politicians that just
| use fraud as an excuse to develop repressive systems.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Pre-Aadhaar, 40-50% of overall welfare system distributions
| was lost due to corruption at the last mile [0]
|
| At the end of the day, India's model of development is
| based on much more statist Japan, South Korea, and
| Singapore's, as most advising, developmental grants, and
| FDI in India is furnished by these 3 countries.
|
| While India may speak English, it's administrative system
| and legal system is closer to Malaysia and Singapore's in
| jurisprudence and central control, and as such,
| administrative leadership in India tends to look at
| Singapore as a model - heck, Narendra Modi was mentored by
| Lee Kuan Yew when he was CM of Gujarat.
|
| Aadhaar itself was developed in coordination with
| Singapore, and is directly based on Malaysia's MyKad and
| Singapore's NRIC.
|
| Aadhaar has had disastrous pitfalls with rollout, but it is
| complete at this point - especially with COVID acting as a
| forcing function.
|
| [0] -
| https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/176312/1/icrier-
| wp-2...
| sreejithr wrote:
| I don't see any "oppression" here. All governments have
| personal data on its citizens. This is a fact of life. So far,
| the Aadhar data has been used for the benefit of society (like
| targeted assistance to people who deserve aid during Covid
| rather than doing "spray and pray")
| yapyap wrote:
| Making life difficult till you eventually do get one is a
| pressure technique to get everyone to conform to whatever it
| is you're trying to impose.
|
| Not sure what the right term'd be but it isn't good
| nevertheless.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| > the Aadhar data has been used for the benefit of society
|
| That's a partial view into it. It's also required for getting
| basic things that have nothing to do with the government,
| e.g. a cell phone number, and this is an example of the
| oppressive problem with it.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| are you aware of the sale of Aadhar biometric data on the
| internet? There have been so many leaks at this point that it
| is borderline funny.
|
| In good faith, how can you look at that and say that Aadhar
| data has been used for the benefit of citizens?
|
| Despite often being "not mandatory", reality will disagree
| with you.
| sreejithr wrote:
| I'd say implementation issues shouldn't influence our
| decision on whether an identity credential is fundamentally
| required or not for the country.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > "The stated goal of Aadhaar is noble, of giving every
| individual an identity, ..."
|
| [Semi-offtopic] Just my favorite pet peeve: Identity _cannot_ be
| given - it 's an inherent, innate property of the individual. Or
| a group. So, as I get it, Aadhaar is not an identity, it's a
| credential ("ID" is not a great term). Government (or anyone else
| other than oneself) doesn't give anyone an identity, they merely
| authenticate your identity and issue or certify a credential.
|
| Language is a mess, and that's why I felt important to leave this
| comment - just to put my two cents against all the confusion that
| already exist out there. I recently saw a joke that says "auth"
| is short for "it's either authentication or authorization but I
| don't remember the difference right now" and it seems so relevant
| :-)
|
| And, yes, I believe the term "identity provider" is a perversion
| of nature - a blatant attempt at what should be called "identity
| theft" (instead of what the industry calls "identity theft").
| alephnerd wrote:
| It is an identity though. That's why it's managed by the Unique
| Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
|
| The Indian government de facto treats Aadhaar as the primary
| form of identification within India in the aftermath of the
| inability of Indian forces in Ladakh being unable to identify
| Pakistani nationals from Indian nationals during the Kargil
| War, as well as the broken and disjointed identification
| process in India that used a mix of voter ID rolls,
| village/panchayat rolls, and other lossy methods.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > It is an identity though. That's why it's managed by the
| Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
|
| Sorry, I could be wrong, but I cannot agree here. It's an
| identity document ("ID"), something that documents an
| identity (so, a credential), not an identity itself.
|
| Put simply: identity document [?] credential* [?] identity.
|
| I really don't like the term "ID" - specifically because it
| leads to this kind of confusion (and this leads to all sorts
| of problems), but it's too well established out there...
|
| And I totally get the goal of Aadhaar (or most government-
| issued identity documents for that matter); my comment was
| unrelated to India (which is why I marked it as semi-
| offtopic) but solely regarding the language in the article.
|
| *) Note: "credential" is a wider term: all identity documents
| are a form of credential but not every credential is an
| identity document. I originally put "=" between ID and
| credential, but edited it later for clarity.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Fair enough. I think it's a semantic argument, but words
| can have an overloaded meaning. In colloquial English,
| identification can be treated as credentialing as well.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > I think it's a semantic argument
|
| Exactly! And all I wanted to say is "Please don't use
| harmful semantics, even if a lot of people do so because
| it's convenient or widespread. Your identity is yours, no
| one can give it to you or take it from you, it is simply
| who you are - don't let others believe otherwise and
| don't let others switch the meaning."
|
| Gradual acceptance of such quirks leads to gradual
| transformation of thought and erosion of identity. And
| that leads to all sort of bad things.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| An "indentity" on this context is the opposite of something
| innate to an individual: it is the fact that everyone sees you
| as a single person (as opposed to whatever name you give when
| introducing yourself), in is fundamentally a social tool.
|
| You don't need such an identity to live alone on a desert
| island, or in a remote village where everyone knows each other,
| but it's a necessity in highly mobile modern world where you
| mostly interact with people who know nothing about you except
| this identity.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Thank you. I agree that identity a social concept - I'm not
| sure there is a need for identities without a society.
|
| However, I believe you're confusing "identity" and "identity
| document".
|
| Identity document (which is fundamentally different from
| identity itself) is a social tool too, serving the purpose
| you've mentioned - consistently identifying someone to the
| society as a single person.
|
| However, what I wanted to point out that it is absolutely
| _not_ an identity, but rather a credential. That 's not how
| it's typically colloquially called, but that's what it
| factually and effectively is. (Of course, please let me know
| if I'm wrong.)
|
| Making a passport or some online account an actual identity
| is a true "identity theft" - an attempt of the modern world
| to take over human identities. And I really don't like this
| trend. I can't really put it well, but something about it is
| deeply unnerving to me, it's just so philosophically wrong.
| Hope you can see it.
|
| Oh, and I specifically want to clarify: absolutely nothing
| wrong with governments issuing documents, of course! Just
| please, for the love of all that's still sane in the world,
| don't call such documents an "identity" - it is really not.
|
| And that's the only reason I'm so anal about this - language
| shapes reality, and identities are already quite messed up,
| so I thought I'd try to point it out. Sure, I'm pissing
| against the wind here (and I'm bad at expressing my thoughts
| well), but I have to try.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| I'm not sure you can really separate concepts and their
| practical embodiment in this world.
|
| To expand on your example, when you get your passport
| stolen and someone gets a credit in your name, it's not
| just the document that has been stolen but very well your
| _identity_ as seen by society: now the entire society (in
| practice the bankers and law enforcement, maybe your
| employer or eventually even your neighbors) think that
| _you_ own the bank some money, and the bank will leverage
| their legal power to recoup their money from _you_.
|
| And respectively, if the state you live in decides that
| Aleksei Deaman* doesn't exist, removes all traces of you
| from official records and declares that all identity
| document you have are counterfeit ones, then you lose your
| identity pretty much instantly: your bank will close your
| bank account, your insurance doesn't cover you, including
| your housing loan, and your employer cannot keep you
| because you are now assumed to be an illegal immigrant. At
| the end of the day your life is pretty much ruined, not
| just because you've lost your _identity papers_ , but
| because your entire social _identity_ has been taken away
| from you.
|
| The less familial and based on mutual trust a society is,
| the more the distinction between "identity" and "identity
| papers" is blurred. (Not saying that it's a good or a bad
| thing, that's just what it is).
| drdaeman wrote:
| > it's not just the document that has been stolen but
| very well your identity as seen by society
|
| Yes, and that's also very wrong:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15346081 (the
| article link died, but it's still available at
| https://medium.com/securitybytes/quick-one-stop-calling-
| it-i...)
|
| > but because your entire social identity has been taken
| away from you.
|
| I totally agree with all you say, factually - yea, if the
| state decides I no longer exist, I'm pretty much fucked,
| pardon my language.
|
| Except that - if we use correct terms - I don't lose my
| identity, I lose _authorization_ because my credentials
| are revoked (or erased) and so no one formally or legally
| recognizes me anymore.
|
| The identity is still there, though. Even the "social
| identity" - if we look at the original social identity
| theory, if I get it right, it's a _self-concept_ ,
| derived from one's own perceived membership in some
| social group. The social identity will be only "lost"
| (or, rather, transformed into something different) when I
| mentally process the erasure and stop believing I'm a
| part of the society I used to be a part of, and maybe
| start living and associating with somewhere else. Which
| is going to happen pretty quick in the outlined scenario,
| of course. But even though the factual outcome is the
| same - the semantics are whole lot different. And I
| believe that's really important.
|
| Not using the correct terms is exactly the issue that
| irks me so much. If we start believing (most people
| already do) that "identity" is something that is provided
| to us by society, that our passports are our identities,
| it gradually leads us to decisions that we wouldn't have
| made otherwise, because things _sound_ okay - but they
| only do because the language was perverted in a way to
| make them sound so.
| r9295 wrote:
| Needed to get one for my passport. At that point, in 2017, it
| "wasn't required" but the state bureaucracy made it clear I
| wasn't getting it without my Aadhar card.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| I got my passport in 2015 without one. Was surprisingly asked
| no questions about the lack of one.
| alephnerd wrote:
| The Aadhaar Act, 2016 is what gave the Aadhaar system it's
| teeth.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aadhaar_Act,_2016
| rishabhd wrote:
| I got mine renewed without Aadhaar. Took 15 extra minutes, but
| it happened. That too at a tier 2 city (Dehradun).
| r9295 wrote:
| Renewals, from what I heard, were difficult to hinder since
| you already had an official state issued document.
| suriya-ganesh wrote:
| apropos to this.
|
| You can pretty much google up and download millions of Aadhar
| directly from the web.
|
| https://x.com/deedydas/status/1838595739137773570
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I have a six letter Gmail email and get emailed tens of aadhar
| cards a year.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Just curious: why doesn't this person have an Aadhaar number? Is
| it because he doesn't want one for ideological reasons, or is
| there some class of people for whom getting one is difficult or
| impossible?
| throwup238 wrote:
| It's ideological for him (he's a relatively well known
| entrepreneur and privacy advocate) but there _are_ classes of
| people for whom getting an Aadhaar number is difficult for
| practical reasons: homeless individuals, nomadic and migrant
| workers, remote tribal communities, refugees, elderly people
| who were born before reliable record keeping in their region,
| and transgender people.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Interesting and makes sense, thanks. I'm not Indian so I had
| never heard of this before today.
| sunshowers wrote:
| Kiran was instrumental in getting a strong net neutrality
| regime in India, so he's a pretty effective activist too.
| (I've met him a couple of times.)
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I don't think it is appropriate to dismiss concerns around
| privacy and authoritarianism as "ideology".
| umanwizard wrote:
| I didn't dismiss anything. Ideology is not necessarily bad.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I'm all for privacy but fail to understand what the authors
| fundamental beef is with Aadhar. Sounds better as a system to me
| than what the US has.
| sreejithr wrote:
| He chooses not to use it on privacy grounds. But, this is a
| common problem with most national identity databases tbh. Its
| more likely a political decision than a privacy one.
| bparsons wrote:
| How is this different than a social insurance number/drivers
| license number?
|
| It is very hard to do business with, or deliver services to
| someone when you cannot verify their identity.
| yapyap wrote:
| yikes :/ that's gonna be the entire world in the future
| kkfx wrote:
| Well...
|
| Digital identities are a natural step since we need to digitalize
| the society and so we need to have digital IDs like we need
| physical ones.
|
| The point though it's another, or when imposing them and how. In
| a country where 99% of homes could be connected and most have
| already internet access, where a large slice of population use
| computers every day, so elderly typically have relatives who can
| help, and those who really need help are few enough there is no
| problem helping them directly it's a thing. Imposing them (even
| worse than de jure, but de facto) in a country where a large
| slice of population have not even a home with an address and
| ordinary services it's definitively another.
|
| India's digital strategy, the 100 smart city program etc are just
| fascist move to cut off a large slice of population for whom the
| ruler count to have no option to accommodate in a new society.
| And it's not much different than various imposition we witness in
| the west, a small step at a time, more softly.
| BadHumans wrote:
| No, we don't NEED to digitalize society. We could due with less
| digital things for the betterment of society.
| kkfx wrote:
| To achieve such result you need to digitalize for real. Here
| in the EU the current state of things is crappy because most
| do not want digitization and that's so happen driven by few
| interested parties. So instead of having a smart card per
| document we have a complicated three-level system handed to
| the private sector, we have not much coherent digital
| invoices, an economist have even suggested to create "a
| virtual State to simplify things", we have certified mails in
| some countries so badly designed you can't keep then for sure
| for 10+ year and so on.
|
| If people instead of pretend to stop the history train
| embrace it and impose a certain conduit we could have much
| better things with much less complicates crappy bureaucratic
| choices for the sake of few against the other. Try to keep
| parts of a paper-based world in a bit-based society we
| already are, it just trying to be Luddites ending as the
| original ones... A small example: we end up in de facto
| mandatory smartphones for all simply because only very few
| have battled to have smart-cards and some are interested in
| imposing macro-bugs to the whole population. The whole
| population have tried to ignore the evolution, keeping the
| paper and they end up with a (cr)app instead of a good smart
| card.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _we need to digitalize the society_
|
| Why?
| kkfx wrote:
| Economy, quickness, simplicity, effectiveness, comfort.
|
| Let's say you have a smart-card as a digital ID, you need a
| new one because the one you have is expiring. With classic
| model you go to a certain office in a certain timeframe to do
| that. In a digital world you order the new one from you
| desktop, being identified enough, you can than take a photo
| directly from your cam, then via mail you get the new one,
| you confirm you have it in hand with the card itself and you
| get a new pin. Done. The same if you lost an ID. There is no
| need to force smartphones crapplications and alike to be
| digital.
|
| Then you have your health infos in the health system of your
| country, any doctor with your ID and their own could access
| all your relevant records.
|
| At a supermarket you can prove your identity simply passing
| the card on a reader, the sole data share is "you can buy
| alcohol or not".
|
| To open an account with a bank, you just authenticate
| yourself to a public system that gives the banks the relevant
| data they legally need and nothing more, you know they could
| ask for something else but all requests are optional.
|
| You purchase a home? You can sign the contract from remote
| with your ID. You can retrieve the relevant docs at any time
| from the relevant public administration as a PADES signed
| pdf/a and so on.
|
| All these things simplify life and reduce time and cost spent
| in doing anything.
|
| Of course yes, the same passage could be used to act against
| you in a dictatorship and so on, but the bar is simple:
| knowing the tech means imposing furor populi a good one, so
| for instance smart cards and not smartphone craplications,
| for instance IDs, not "digital wallets" and so on. Try to
| keep the old system means leaving few interested party
| pushing their own favorite solution against all others
| interests. As have always happened...
| rangestransform wrote:
| I think we should introduce as much friction as possible
| for the government to track us across businesses
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| If you want to make life difficult for yourself another way, you
| should try interacting with the Indian bureaucracy without a
| local mobile phone number.
| sunshowers wrote:
| To be fair that's true in any country.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| UK.gov happily sends OTPs to my US mobile number; nor was it
| my experience in Japan that I had problems.
| sunshowers wrote:
| I think it's really patchy at least in the US -- even if
| the SMS backend supports international numbers the database
| or UI might just not support them.
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