With the recent passing of regulations, the Sri Lankans government to issue new digital id cards with a central database of citizens have come under scrutiny. When Advocata hosted Indian political analyst Prof Pratap Bhanu Mehta earlier this year we asked what lessons Sri Lanka can learn from India's digital ID project Aadhar
Q: Sri Lanka is planning to introduce a digital Id called the e-nic project. In India, you have experience with the Aadhar project that’s digitized millions of identity data. What can we learn from this in Sri Lanka
A: This is something that is going to be a big challenge for the future. There is no question in terms of ease and convenience. Some form of digital ID is very attractive. There’s almost a kind of utopian romance people associate this notion of, one ID, one authentication and all services open up- you don’t need multiple cards, multiple agencies. Certainly we want a way of redeeming the promise. You can’t roll back the tide of technology and in any case we’re doing that with private companies, Google, Facebook all the time, so why not harness for a public purpose?
I think the real danger is that these are tools of surveillance and and these are also tools of control and you need to see new, robust privacy legislations. You need a consent architecture for it- how is this information is going to be used? and what are you consenting to when you use this ID. You need an information architecture -- who is allowed to share what and with whom? Because with that digital ID, depending on how it is designed, can potentially reveal a lot of information about a person. It has to be embedded in deep institutional safeguards.
In India, the worry is that -- and most of us were moderate proponents of Aadhar -- we are rushing into the ease and convenience part, but frankly there is very little protection on privacy and almost no protection on surveillance. And as the experience of democracy is globally showing you have to safeguard against the possibility that authoritarian elements within our societies might use this information and data to control and surveil populations, and you need safeguards against that.
Prof Mehta who was an earlier a moderate proponent of Aadhar wrote a hard hitting Column on the project arguing the project has gone too far. Sri Lanka’s e-NIC project is even more casual on concerns around privacy and transparency.
The video of the exchange is below