Hyderabad HC: Internet a 'maya bazaar', Aadhaar data may stay online

HYDERABAD: Likening the virtual world to 'Maya Bazar' (an illusory world), the Hyderabad high court has expressed doubts whether Aadhaar data once posted on the Internet could be deleted completely.
A bench of Justice V Ramasubramanian and Justice P Kesava Rao said this in an interim order delivered on Monday in a public interest plea filed by software engineer Kodali Srinivas of Kukatpally, who wanted the court to direct the Election Commission to delete Aadhaar details linked to voter identity cards.
The bench went through the EC's counter, in which it stated that the poll body commenced collecting details of Aadhaar and seeding them with voter IDs in 2015, but later abandoned the exercise after the Supreme Court passed an order directing the EC not to collect Aadhaar details of voters. After that there were three revisions of electoral rolls all over the country without Aadhaar details, the EC said.
The bench, however, was sceptical about the claim. "In this 'online Maya Bazar', information once registered or shared gets multiplied by millions of times," the bench said, adding "by the time an order for deletion is passed, the bug repeats itself several times and deletion without a trace appears improbable".
The court has to now look at other options to undo the damage, if it has already been done, the bench said. Referring to the petitioner's suggestion for a forensic data security audit, the bench made it clear it cannot order such a huge exercise at the interim stage. "We shall take up the issue at the time of final hearing of the case," the bench said appreciating the efforts of the petitioner.
The bench dismissed other pleas of the petitioner who wanted the court to direct AP and Telangana to share data attributes of the information they shared with the EC. It also dismissed another plea that wanted the EC to make public any hidden attributes it had relied on while de-duplicating electoral rolls.
"On one hand, you say sharing voter information by states is an infringement of privacy. On the other, you seek hidden data attributes of information from the very states. This goes against the very foundation of your petition, which is seeking to protect privacy of citizens," the bench observed.