“…government authorities advise citizens not to share their Aadhaar details with strangers…”
The sex trade has offered up the latest example of the extensive reach of Aadhaar, India’s national biometric ID program, with a report that a pimp in the state of Goa demanded photos of the Aadhaar cards of prospective clients.
As The Times of India reports, the incident was connected to a bachelor party, when a group of five men visiting the state from Delhi contacted a pimp to arrange for sex workers to be sent to their hotel room. The pimp is said to have demanded that each of the men upload photos of their Aadhaar cards to WhatsApp, along with photos of their room keys, to prove that they were who they said they were, and not in fact police on a sting operation.
Mysteriously, The Times of India’s report does not offer a conclusion to the story, nor does it cite its source; but a quote from an anonymous police officer offering a basic rundown of how such pimps operate may be a clue hinting that these partiers were in fact cops.
In any case, the anecdote, which was picked up in multiple Indian outlets, points to the growing ubiquity of Aadhaar. While the biometric national ID program was initially envisioned as a means of improving access to government services and transparency in the distribution of state subsidies, it’s now used for everything from death certificate issuance to tracking lost Amazon deliveries. Nevertheless, government authorities advise citizens not to share their Aadhaar details with strangers, so it was probably unwise of the Delhi partiers to send those photos to their purported pimp.
Sources: The Times of India, India Today, Nagpur Today
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December 18, 2017 – by Alex Perala
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