Personal details in resident data hubs vulnerable: Experts

HYDERABAD: After sounding the alarm over safety of Aadhaar and Pehchan biometric databases, data security experts have now expressed concern over State Resident Data Hubs of various states including Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra that host personal data of citizens but without any law in place or any use limitation.
Till 2016, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) used to provide a dump of its data to SRDHs, which experts say almost copies the Aadhaar database.After the recent Supreme Court ruling, UIDAI stopped giving access to SRDH, but resident data hubs have got Aadhaar number, demographic data and biometric hash of citizens. Officials say the SRDH database of Telangana, housed in Gachibowli, has helped weed out fake beneficiaries of subsidies.
However, Hyderabad-based data security researcher Srinivas Kodali says in his tweet, “State Resident Data Hubs are surveillance databases which no one refers to. Thirteen states have these hubs. UIDAI actively shared all Aadhaar data with the states. Few states like Andhra Pradesh do e-KYC and geolocate citizens. This is 360-degree profiling. National security is dead.”
The Telangana SRDH website says, “Telangana SRDH is a comprehensive portal for managing demographics including name, gender, age, photograph and address as well as biometric information for facilitating ‘Unique ID’ based identity authentication.
‘SRDH data getting upgraded automatically’
The SRDH adheres to principle of ‘Single Source of Truth’, as it maintains demographic and biometric info of state residents provided by UIDAI at one place and replica at several other locations. SRDH paves way for accurate identification of beneficiary during disbursal of benefits.”
An official of Information Technology, Electronics and Communications department of Telangana on condition of anonymity told TOI: “Before 2016, we used to get a data dump from UIDAI. Now SRDH is getting upgraded automatically. We have data of all citizens of Telangana. We use it to weed out fake beneficiaries, to eliminate duplication and identify eligible beneficiaries for various welfare schemes. SRDH is located in state data centre at Gachibowli. We have biometric hash, but we don’t have actual biometrics like fingerprints.”
“The fate of SRDH too will depend on what SC says on Aadhaar. The Data Protection Bill that would come up may also give certain clarity legally. There should be checks and balances on this data. The SRDH database should not be misused. Privacy of individuals has to be protected,” says Rakesh Reddy Dubbudu of Factly, which has been working on open government data.