HYDERABAD

13 May 2018 00:00 IST

Police using multiple databases to create 360-degree profile of citizens

For the Telangana police every citizen is a blip on the computer screen. Commit a crime, a traffic infraction and the blips get connected bringing in relatives, friends and acquaintances into the picture. The police have begun implementing a context-based relationship discovery technology using available databases at the disposal of the State government.

“We are using technology to keep us safe. Earlier, data used to be in separate silos. We have now connected them,” said Mahender Reddy, Director General of Police (DGP), Telangana, in a recent interaction where he compared the programme to that of the American Homeland Security. A few days earlier, the DGP inaugurated a Technology Fusion Centre by showing banks of LED screens showing real-time footage of various parts of the city promising 24x7 security.

Big brother is watching you, always. At the heart of the beast is a massive data-crunching algorithm developed for the police by a group of private companies. It analyses every record, both in the internal and external data sources available with user departments based on a combination of attributes like: Name, father’s name, mother’s name, spouse’s name, address, date of birth, mobile no, contact no, driving licence, voter ID, Aadhaar, crime number etc. to identity, and group the records of a citizen or crime history of a citizen as well as identifying the relationships the person shares with others.

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“How this information will be used or abused we can’t yet anticipate. The government will know too much information about you and we don’t know who all will have access to this information,” says online security researcher Srinivas Kodali, red flagging the database project.

360 degree profiling

Young Naveen, caught for drunk driving comes for a counselling session along with his parents and sister to the Goshamahal Traffic Training Centre here with his traffic challan and copies of his and family’s Aadhaar cards. The police official enters the challan number and the Aadhaar number on the computer and then he asks for Aadhaar number of Naveen’s mother who is watching the proceedings anxiously. Within seconds Naveen has become a person of interest for a traffic infraction and his mother’s information is linked to him. All drunk driving offenders have to attend counselling sessions. They then become part of 360-degree profiling database of person of interest as part of the IIH (Integrated Information Hub). The User Departments uniquely identify any person of interest and identify the relationships that person shares with other entities/citizens, on the fly, with a 360-degree view in the IIH database now renamed Technology Fusion Centre.

Using Aadhaar, the police have created multiple linkages from different databases to create a ‘golden record’ updated every day.

Key data that is not available in the Aadhaar database is sourced from a citizen survey database created four years ago. This was an outcome of an ‘Intensive Household Survey’, covering all the households in the State for creating a reliable and accurate database.

Now, this very database is being used by the police department to create family trees and social contexts. “The use of this information for surveillance is troubling. It was collected stating it was for social programmes of the government but is now being used for data mining.

This itself is a violation of the social contract. We are trying to explore legal options to stop this intrusive surveillance that violates privacy at every level,” says Arjun Reddy, a High Court lawyer.