| The illogic in these arguments is astounding. Maybe I can simplify it for you with a few analogies. >All people criticising Aadhar for being insecure frankly don't have a real solution in place. Criticising something doesn't necessitate me to providing a solution. It's like saying all movie critics should be good actors. >Being an Indian citizen I know and have experienced benefit owing to Aadhar. I get subsidies from the government, one uniform identity that I can use to get important things. Sure aadhar might have some benefits for you. But the critique is raising many points which make it incredibly dangerous and harmful in the long run. It's like using steroids to gain muscle faster, which is very harmful in the long term. >Coming to the security part, which centralised biometric DB doesn't have risks. Yes and those systems do get criticised so it can be improved. Also, aadhar claims to be open source, open API, run by volunteers, none of which it is. It sells your data to private services. Were you going to address that point at all? >Mozilla being such a nice organisation with so many good initiatives. Why don't it come forward and dedicate some of its resources in helping out the Indian Government? Indian government has a lot of resources too. It's not exactly poor. It could do a good job if it wanted to. That's not what this criticism is about. >Wouldn't that be better than just criticising without knowing any ground reality of how things operate in India? How do you know the author doesn't know the ground reality of things in India? Look, criticism of a system or policy serves to ignite debate on how best we can make improvements and move forward. Rather than being snarky and getting all defensive and making silly illogical arguments, how about you contribute to the discussion by addressing the points raised in the article? |
Poor Indians trying to get benefits but having those benefits taken is a life threatening crisis for those impoverished individuals and families. It is entirely forgivable for those families to ignore the "long term consequences" when the short term consequence is losing the meager benefits they have to corruption. Your argument is like arguing that chemotherapy will ruin your body when the patient is dying of cancer.
If their system can stamp out widespread corruption in exchange for some loss of privacy, the cure is not worse than the disease. The technically minded in wealthy countries should consider helping by proposing a better solution, rather than criticizing measures borne from true desperation.