The government on Wednesday informed Parliament that the information provided by individuals for issuance of UIDAI numbers will be kept confidential.
“Adequate safeguards have been provided to ensure individual’s privacy and confidentiality of information,” Minister of State for Planning, Mr Ashwani Kumar, said in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.
The mandate of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is to issue UID numbers (Aadhaar) to all residents of India.
“The total amount incurred for the project during the current financial year 2011—12 (up to October, 2011) is Rs 210.22 crore,” Mr Kumar added.
The UIDAI collects five demographic details —— Name, age, gender, address and name of the father/mother/spouse/guardian.
“In order to ensure that the confidentiality of the data is maintained, UIDAI will not allow download of the data from its Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR) and will answer the queries only in ‘Yes’ or ‘No’,” Mr Kumar said.
He said a number of processes have been put in place to ensure that the data collected by UIDAI is not accessed in unauthorised manner.