Indian biometric ID system coerces people to submit their personal biometrics to receive their rights. By Billy Perrigo.
The world’s largest biometric ID system [is] India’s Aadhaar program.
When the program launched in 2009, India set out to achieve a world-first: giving every citizen a unique, biometrically-verifiable identification number. Those biometrics (iris scans and fingerprint records) would be linked to a person’s Aadhaar number, which would in turn be used in all interactions with the state — weeding out fraud, making taxation more efficient, and ultimately saving money, the government said.
Countries around the world looked on to see if it would work. Today, 1.2 billion Indians — including over 99% of the adult population — are enrolled.
Proving your ID is now cheap in India:
Increasingly, private companies began using Aadhaar numbers to quickly and cheaply ‘onboard’ new customers. In other words, instead of going through the lengthy and expensive process of logging people’s identities and then having to verify their accuracy, banks, e-wallet providers and insurance companies could just compare a customer’s Aadhaar card to the readings from a fingerprint machine, and sign people up for services that might have been prohibitively expensive before. …
Does it work? Broadly, yes. The technology behind the system works for the majority of Indians. Aadhaar has so far saved the Indian government as much as $12.4 billion, according to an official from the Unique Identification Authority of India, which administers the program. …
Problems:
But critics said that the scheme, while supposedly voluntary, had imposed itself increasingly onto citizens’ private lives. It became near impossible in India to buy a cellphone contract or open a bank account, for example, without providing an Aadhaar number. …
There have been reports of migrant and rural children who never received birth certificates being disallowed from school enrolment because of not being able to prove their identity in order to sign up for an Aadhaar card. There have been other reports of leprosy sufferers with no fingers or eyes having their state benefits cancelled because fingerprints and iris scans are mandatory.
Further questions were raised by privacy advocates. In January, India’s Tribune newspaper announced that one of its reporters had managed to purchase personal information leaked from the Aadhaar database from a broker for just 500 rupees ($7).
It’s becoming a social credit system (by Mac Slavo):
Millions of children in India now can’t go to school because they’ve failed to submit to India’s biometric ID system, AADHAAR. …
Aadhaar is more than just a system that coerces people to submit their personal biometrics to receive their rights.
It’s actually a giant social credit system lauded by political heavyweights and global dystopian rulers. Not much Western attention has been put on the Aadhaar system because it’s been overshadowed by their current geopolitical foe — China and its social credit system. …
Bill Gates, of all people, explained that the Aadhaar system is “huge asset for India” and branded the creator of the system, Nandan Nilekani — a partner of the WEF — a “hero.” ..
Why is it that any time a dystopian system of human enslavement rolls out, Bill Gates is mentioned? If you think it could never happen here, think again. That’s the goal.
Expect such systems to proliferate. The technology exists and the ruling class would rather like it.
Government is just way too big.
