Aadhaar doesn’t pose any privacy issue, says Bill Gates

When asked about privacy concerns that have dogged the unique identification project, Gates said the applications that access the Aadhaar database must be closely scrutinised. “Aadhaar in itself doesn’t pose any privacy issue because it’s just a bio ID verification scheme. The individual applications that use Aadhaar, you have to look and see what’s been stored and who has access to that information. And so, application by application, you have to make sure that’s well managed. In the case of the financial bank account I think it’s handled very well,” he said.

Observing that Aadhaar was started before Prime Minister Narendra Modi came into office, Gates said that it was very much to his credit that he was willing to embrace it.

“I’m both good friend and an admirer of Nandan Nilekani and some of the initiatives of digitisation efforts that can help with education that can help with governance,” he said.

In his lecture on ‘Technology for Transformation’ organised by NITI Aayog on November 2016, Gates had said that Aadhaar is something that had never been done by any government before, not even in a rich country. More than a billion people in India have enrolled in Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric ID system. The data is collected by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), a statutory authority established in January 2009 by the Government of India.

with PTI inputs