How safe is our personal information with government

[goodboy_mentor]

It is really disturbing that government wants to create a database of Arms Licenses, whereas it has trouble keeping "Top Secret" documents of Defense Ministry and other confidential data of various government departments from getting pilfered/stolen.
Reference: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_ch ... rt_1368175
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story ... ments.html

[mundaire]

Not sure how many here realise that this year's national census combined with the National Unique ID (NUID) project (see http://uidai.gov.in/ for more) seeks to take this even further.

They intend to collate not just the usual census information but also take fingerprints (all 10 digits), note down things such as mobile/ internet usage etc. etc.

There are some serious privacy issues at stake here, but like gun rights privacy issues do not seem to have entered the national conciousness yet, at least not in any visible/ vocal way... I am a long time member of a mailing list which discusses telecom industry/related issues (google india-gii for more) and these issues do get discussed there often... but there's just a few hundred people on that list and I have yet to see anyone in the mainstream media raising these issues in any real way.

Cheers!
Abhijeet

[timmy]

If India is at all like the USA, few people care. Back in the 90s, I represented a major telecom company in one of the 7 Number Portability entities in the USA. There are seven companies, each in a "Baby Bell" region, that operate data bases to provide number portability for phone numbers. This means that, when you change your phone company, you can keep your phone number. The data bases take care of routing and billing information -- by law!

Well, along came the FBI and wanted a tap into these data bases. I said that this was beyond the legal charter of the company, which clearly specified "routing and rating (billing)" and nothing else.

Nobody cared and they all did what they wanted.

The government doesn't need to keep data bases on people. They have taps into every major data base that can get them all the information on location, purchases, or anything that's on a computer anywhere. They can say they are not keeping records on law abiding citizens, because they don't -- they just access the data bases of companies that do keep this information, which is just as good and gets around legal implications quite nicely.

Then, there is that "ECHELON" system, which can tap into pretty much anything that's going on, and was a huge embarrassment when an Australian MP let the secret slip. It is operated by Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the USA. The CIA, supposedly limited to foreign spying only, would simply request the intelligence service of one of the other countries to spy on a citizen for them, and the information would be passed.

Of course, since 9/11 and the Patriot Act, even the fig leaf of privacy protected by law is gone, as wiretaps can be accomplished without warrants. Most of the major switches produced by Cisco have a "back door" that can be accessed by law enforcement, a capability that was obtained by the government in the 90s.

My guess is that there are some arrangements in place between the USA and India regarding security, but who knows what they might be?

The bottom line is, anyone who thinks that their business is private in the information age is just kidding themselves. If there's an electronic record somewhere, it is accessible by someone. Who "Someone" is and what they are doing with the data is impossible to tell.

I'm not trying to sound like Chicken Little here: Once the government has a power, they are very reluctant to give it up. This will not go away, since nobody really cares about it anyway, except for a few. That's been my experience, especially with the phone companies. When the government came to them for data after 9/11, all but one gave over what ever was asked for without a warrant or any legality. That's the way things work. We just have to live with it.

[nagarifle]

Timmy
how right you are. one thing the (any)government do not realise(may be they do) is that if they issue a unique id, as India plans to. guess what all the criminals will take out fake/false ids. Thus they can operate with legal ids. so much for law and order.

[timmy]

I don't think that there's any way around this sad fact. Here in the USA, for instance, the fears of possible fraud and privacy violations caused Social Security cards to carry the qualification: not to be used for identification purposes.

Guess what?

Everyone uses it for exactly that purpose, from the government on down to the tiniest business person. They all want it. Personally, I don't give it to them. But since most people do so without protest, it has become an expectation.

[goodboy_mentor]

I appears to be a part of big deep rooted conspiracy to put all the law abiding citizens into an inescapable guillotine like grip of government. First people were asked to obtain PAN cards, unsuspecting people happily applied to obtain PAN cards thereby furnishing loads of private information. Then PAN cards were made mandatory for every financial transaction and also came in the TDS. Even further now CBDT is proposing to implement Anti Terror financing law against income tax evaders to fill the coffers of ever increasing corruption ridden government departments. Reference:
http://www.lawyersclubindia.com/news/CB ... ERS/10850/
Now they go a step further to collate not just the usual census information but also take fingerprints (all 10 digits), note down things such as mobile/ internet usage etc. etc.

[timmy]

I just noticed this in the news today. If you have ever been concerned about your privacy lately, you needn't be, as you can see from this article. Any semblance of privacy is only a fantasy from the dim, dark pre-information age past.

In digital world, we trade privacy for convenience