The curious case of tweeting an Aadhaar number: trust/mistrust in security practices of public data infrastructures

ABSTRACT

This paper explores data security practices of Aadhaar, India's biometrics-based national identification number, and the co-constitution of trust and mistrust that underlies its operation as a public data infrastructure. Based on 18-months of multi-sited ethnographic research, I document tensions around whether Aadhaar numbers were designed to be disclosed publicly or kept confidential. I further map identification practices around how residents share their Aadhaar numbers with other government and private organizations to access services. These practices to promote sharing of Aadhaar numbers broke down with growing anxieties over their public disclosure on government websites, lack of audits, and emerging forms of Aadhaar-based frauds. In response to this rising mistrust, an ex-member of Aadhaar's design team publicly disclosed his number in a tweet that went viral. The paper uses this tweet as a point of departure to: (1) provide an account of infrastructural concerns (grounded in design choices and events) that transformed Aadhaar from a public to a confidential number; and (2) illustrate that this transformation reflects how trust and mistrust co-constitute Aadhaar's data security practices. I conclude by illustrating how these infrastructural concerns imbricate to produce a spectrum of possibilities where identity numbers are simultaneously public and confidential, trusted and mistrusted.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• mistrust
• public data infrastructures
• identification
• digital ID

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Kristoffer Albris and James Maguire, anonymous reviewers, and members of the RAW session at Data & Society Research Institute for their invaluable feedback and suggestions. Parts of the paper were presented in a Data & Society academic workshop on Trust and Doubt in Public-Sector Data Infrastructures in 2021 and in a session on Trust in a Digital Age at the 21st Science and Democracy Network Annual Meeting in 2022.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, the Aadhaar Dashboard: https://www.uidai.gov.in/aadhaar_dashboard/.

2 Hindi for ‘mark of a lion.’ The imprint of the state emblem of India features three Asiatic lions standing back-to-back on a circular base.

3 See, posts on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hashtag/AadhaarLeaks

Additional information

Funding

Fieldwork for this research was supported by National Science Foundation [Grant Number 1655753]. Support for writing this paper was provided by Siegel Family Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Ranjit Singh

Ranjit Singh is a Researcher at the AI on the Ground Initiative of Data & Society Research Institute. His research interests lie at the intersection of data infrastructures, global development, and public policy. His current research projects invigorate existing efforts to reframe the global south as home to the majority of the human population and investigate the diverse ethics, politics, and experiences of living with and regulating data and AI. His dissertation research at Cornell University focused on data-driven marginality and challenges faced by citizens in claiming voice and representation through data in biometrics-based data-driven organization of welfare services in India.