Nilekani preparing ground to take cover?

Seems that one of the smartest sons of India is practicing fancy footwork to avoid the repercussions of the Unique ID project.  By saying that the UIDAI will back law to protect data, he has now admitted that existing laws do not protect privacy of an Indian citizen.

But on further reading, the report seems to suggest that he is preparing grounds to claim “I told you so … I thought so…”, further down the years.  Let us take a quick look:

• UIDA will ‘support, endorse’ any new Act to protect privacy and data security
• Such an Law will not be part of the UID Act, which will legitimize the UID
• Thus any data breach or intrusion of privacy will NOT be the responsibility of the UIDA
• UIDA will be ‘just’ data ‘collecting’, number ‘issuing’ authority – a backend; something like your mobile phone operator – just give you a phone number, if you misuse it or anybody harasses you, you’ve to run to someone else for protection.
• UID itself will not collect data – it will be done by ‘Registrars’ – including oil marketing companies, National Census Bureau and National Population Register – some, if not all of them, have information which are supposed to be in public domain.
• How are you going to segregate the public domain vs.UID data?
• What happens if there is a mix-up or breach?
• The ‘banks’ will be both ‘registrar’ and ‘partner’ – so how do you restrict them to ‘Y or N’ query? 
• And which ‘banks’ are going to be ‘registrars’?  Will it include ICICI and HDFC, which are non-Indian owned banks?
• If so, do these banks have any company rules prohibiting say a Paki or a Chinki from becoming CEO or CIO and releasing data to Al-Qaeda, ISI or PLA?
• And last, if info will be released for reasons of ‘national security’, who is the authority to decide that ‘national security’ is involved vis-a-vis a particular citizen?

On the whole, I’ve just this to say …

Mr. Nilekani, you’re sowing the wind …

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