UIDAI rejects reports of foreign firms accessing sensitive Aadhaar data

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has said that Aadhaar data is fully safe and secure and has robust security which cannot be compromised.

In a statement, the body rejected charges that foreign firms were accessing sensitive data. It said, no Aadhaar information has ever been stored or processed outside its own data centre and resides only within its fully-secured servers.

UIDAI said, these servers have no linkages to the outside world through the Internet or any other means, including laptops and pen drives.The statement said, the UIDAI data centre is an infrastructure of critical importance and is protected accordingly with high technology, conforming to the best standards of security.

The Aadhaar issuing body said, such data is accessible only to the biometric



software provider's solution for the purpose of processing of data within the highly secure environment of UIDAI data centre.The UIDAI claimed, the data centre premises are fully protected physically and hardware supplies are tested twice before being put to use in the data centre.

The UIDAI said the role of the biometric service providers is to offer de-duplication software which too runs on UIDAI's secure servers and data centres.It said, all the service providers are bound by strict confidentiality regime under the contract, and violation would lead to three years of imprisonment.

The statement from the UIDAI comes amid reports that an RTI application has revealed that the Aadhaar contract gave foreign firms access to classified personal data such as fingerprints and iris scan information.