A terrible idea

A terrible idea

Linking Aadhaar with social media won’t curb fake news, it will only kill privacy.

Although the Supreme Court has now restrained the Madras high court from passing final orders in the matter, the Aadhaar-social media linking public interest litigation is problematic on several levels. The original petition was filed last year for interlinking of the Aadhaar database with social media profiles for authentication of identity. This was deemed necessary for tackling fake news and other cybercrimes.

To begin with, seeding Aadhaar data with social media profiles simply isn’t practical because most of the services in question have a global footprint. Thus, linking an identity document for users from a certain geographic region doesn’t make sense. Besides, what happens to someone creating social media accounts from foreign locations? Second, if tackling fake news is the issue here, then a better approach will be to educate users about the problem. Fake news and gossip aren’t new phenomena and predate the online era. They are common to all societies and politicians use them whenever needed; they cannot be killed at source. Stamping out fake news is a utopian pretence that will be used to ram through intrusive and dystopic measures – as is the case with all utopias.

If the concern relates to inflammatory content that causes violence, then the perpetrators of violence need to be caught and punished. This itself will have the requisite deterrent effect. But the most detrimental impact of linking Aadhaar to social media will be on privacy. The landmark 2017 judgment of the apex court endorsing privacy as a fundamental right should be the guiding standard. Tracking each social media user through Aadhaar undermines this fundamental right, and will be used to censor dissent under the garb of national security. There are just too many things wrong with the idea, it must be scrapped.