Most people love to see fish swim about inside a glass aquarium. Few would enjoy the prospect of trading places with the fish. But that possibility is very much on the cards, with the government making Aadhaar mandatory for an increasing number of functions.

The government needs to put in place a strong privacy law, to prevent such piscine transformation of Indians, and to protect their privacy, recognised by anyone sane as a necessary condition of life and liberty. The Aadhaar law has some provisions to prevent its misuse but that is not enough.

Authentication of a person’s identity using Aadhaar should be only after securing his/her consent in a fashion that leaves a clear, inviolable record. The technology and protocols required to ensure this would appear to be inadequate. Beyond authentication, the very tagging of an increasing number of activities with Aadhaar paves the way for not just the state playing Big Brother who watches whatever you do but also of private companies seeking to map consumers’ behaviour, health, financial status and tastes, to create an information asymmetry prejudicial to not just consumer interest but also individual liberty. The National Health Policy 2017 envisages extensive data gathering on healthcare.

Portability of medical records by storing them in the cloud would be of great use and convenience, no doubt, but if that data can be accessed by people who have no business to, that would be a major problem.

It would be worse, if the data is tagged by Aadhaar and the medical data is correlated with financial data also tagged by Aadhaar. Since payments above a limit would need the income-tax department’s Permanent Account Number (PAN) card to be shown and since PAN has to be mapped to Aadhaar, access to Aadhaar data can potentially lead to access to an individual’s payments history.

Then there are online privacy issues unrelated to Aadhaar.

The EU has assured its citizens they have the right to be forgotten online. Such a right needs a firm legal basis in India as well. Any law, of course, is only as good as its enforcement.