Replying to questions raised in the Parliament about Aadhaar data leakages, PP Chaudhary, the Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, said that "it was found that around 210 websites of Central Government, State Government Departments including educational institutes were displaying the list of beneficiaries along with their name, address, other details and Aadhaar numbers for information of general public." Chaudhary was responding to questions raised by MB Rajesh of the CPI(M). Chaudhary added that there has been no leakage of data from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), and that "UIDAI has taken note of the same and is regularly monitoring the status to get the Aadhaar data removed from the said websites." The Minister also said that: Private players have not acquired any Aadhaar Data including biometrics from UIDAI. The sharing of Aadhaar information is done only with authorized KYC User Agencies (KUAs)/ Authentication User Agencies (AUAs) (both can be Government or private agencies), through authorized secure applications after following well established security procedures and protocols. UIDAI has displayed Aadhaar numbers of citizens in the past too. And in any case if the names, addresses, other personal details, plus Aadhaar numbers of presumably lakhs of beneficiaries were openly available on Government websites, isn't that in itself a leak? Couldn't someone have simply copy + pasted this treasure trove of data onto say a Word document? As we had reported earlier, over the months of February, March and April this year, government departments had leaked Aadhaar data by the millions. And these…
