UIDAI’s U-Turn: Says There Was No Data Breach, Aadhaar Is Public Data!

In May this year, we had asked whether UIDAI’s security mechanism is a big joke, because more than 13 crore Aadhaar numbers of citizens and 10 crore bank accounts linked with Aadhaar was available freely for the public, on Govt. websites.

It seems that the joke is real, because just days after admitting that 210 Govt. websites displayed sensitive Aadhaar data on their portals, UIDAI has now claimed that no data was ever breached!

UIDAI’s U-Turn On Aadhar Leak!

Unique Identification Authority of India, the nodal authority for Aadhaar expansion, has taken a complete u-turn on the issue of Aadhaar leak, and have claimed that the leak never happened.

As per UIDAI, Aadhaar is a ‘public data’, and this ‘public data’ was displayed on the website based on RTI requests from other Indian citizens.

In a statement, UIDAI said,

“The data on these websites was placed in public domain as a measure of proactive disclosure under RTI Act by these government and institutional websites which included beneficiaries’ name, address, bank account, and other details including Aadhaar number and was collected from the third party/users for various welfare schemes,”

Hence, by this logic, we can claim to reveal Aadhaar data of any Indian citizen, because the data is public property anyways.

UIDAI has said that Aadhaar is ‘not a secret’ number, and anyone can access it, anytime.

They said,

“It was this collected info which had been displayed in the public domain under RTI Act. There was no breach or leakage of Aadhaar data from UIDAI database or server as has been aired by the said report,”

Why This Response Is Shocking!

This response from UIDAI is shocking, because because yesterday, UIDAI had admitted that Aadhaar data is freely available across 210 Govt. websites.

And this admittance had been done after PP Chaudhary, who is the Minister of state for electronics and IT, said in the Parliament that some Govt. websites had accidentally displayed Aadhaar data.

Jharkhand Govt. website and several other prominent Govt. portals have revealed sensitive Aadhaar data to the public in the past, and in the view of these, this sharp and stunning u-turn by UIDAI is indeed shocking.

Even UIDAI’s data was hacked few months back, and the data was put on sale on dark net.

Even Wikileaks is claiming that CIA is attempting to hack Aadhaar numbers, and going by the stand of UIDAI which considers Aadhaar as not so secret number, we don’t think CIA would need to hack to get the Aadhaar numbers available.

Maybe a simple Google search will do it for them.

Do share your opinions on this strange stand taken by UIDAI, by commenting right here!