-The Hindu Use OTPs only in the presence of customers: UIDAI The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has asked banks to provide aadhaar-based onetime password (OTP) for opening of bank accounts only in the presence of the customer, in a banking outlet. In a letter addressed to commercial banks, UIDAI Chief Executive Officer Ajay Bhushan Pandey cited instances of misuse of aadhaar while opening accounts. The direction is a huge blow to the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: aadhaar is blind to the purpose of authentication as it only establishes identity and nothing more, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) CEO Ajay Bhushan Pandey told the Supreme Court on Thursday, countering apprehensions that aadhaar would result in “virtual surveillance” of citizens. In the course of a Power-Point presentation, Pandey said aadhaar was a tool to establish identity and was not an aggregator of...

-The Hindu Chief Justice Misra asks why people preferring anonymity are also compelled to part with their personal data to access services. The government has assured the Supreme Court that aadhaar is not a “fly-by-night effort to score some brownie points” and personal data collected from millions of people is safe from breach in storage facilities barricaded behind five-feet thick walls. Appearing before a Constitution Bench led by Chief Justice of India Dipak...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Centre on Wednesday will start countering a mountain of legal issues heaped against aadhaar in the Supreme Court by numerous petitioners in the last two months, primarily focussing on violation of individual’s right to privacy through collection and storage of biometric data. During 19 days of arguments spanning two months since it began on January 17, senior advocates Shyam Divan, Kapil Sibal, P Chidambaram, Gopal...

-The Hindu Business Line The SC interim order presents the biometric ID as a fait accompli for the underprivileged Last week’s interim order of the Supreme Court on a batch of petitions challenging aadhaar may have provided temporary relief to a section of the population, but it appears to have simultaneously served notice on another section – a largely disadvantaged one — that the contentious biometric identification is something of a fait...