India launched Aadhaar, now the world’s biggest biometric database, in 2009 to streamline welfare payments and reduce wastage in public spending. “There is rampant interlinking of discrete databases without data protection,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The court’s landmark ruling also recognised “informational privacy” as part of the right to privacy and asked the government to put in place a robust data protection framework. Last month, the ministry for information technology released a draft data protection law to prevent misuse of personal information, which also suggested grounds under which such data can be processed without consent. But in addition to a comprehensive data protection law, Aadhaar must be made voluntary, as it was originally intended, said Mishi Chaudhary, a technology lawyer.

Source: The Express Tribune December 13, 2017 11:03 UTC