National ID cards and privacy.

There are many criticisms of the National Identity Card with respect to its impact on privacy including the fact that citizen’s personal data will now be concentrated in one location, rendering the information more vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, dissemination and disclosure then if it were decentralized. The specific risks associated with the concentration and centralization of personal information in the Multipurpose National Identification Card database include; "errors in the collection of information, recording of inaccurate data, corruption of data from anonymous sources, and unauthorized access to or disclosure of personal information."

Many people are also concerned by the lack of security measures in place to properly safeguard citizen’s private, sensitive information as India has no generally established data protection laws such as the USA’s federal privacy statute or the European directive on data protection, and such a lack of regulation could encourage the trading and selling of personal information due to the absence of strong penalization as a deterrent.

Due to the sensitive nature of the data which is to be collected about individuals, rigorous mechanisms and structures for auditing the effect of the MNIC database on citizen’s privacy need to be established. Unfortunately, currently there are no such mechanisms in place and if the National Identity Card authority is to implement new systems or store more data about every individual, there is no body or system which could assess the effects of such an action on the privacy of individuals and provide recommendations or prevent the implementation of privacy eroding add-ons. As a result of this lack of inbuilt oversight and independent, credible review, there can be no proper re-evaluation and regulation of the information the MNIC database collects on individuals.

On the legal front it can be argued that if National ID cards are made compulsory, individuals privacy rights will be greatly eroded as, “International law and India’s domestic law expressly set a standard in tort law and through constitutional law to protect an individual’s privacy from unlawful invasion, under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), ratified by India, an individual’s right to privacy is protected from arbitrary or unlawful interference by the state, the Supreme Court also held the right to privacy to be implicit under article 21 of the Indian Constitution in Rajgopal v. State of Tamil Nadu and India has enacted a number of laws that provide some protection for privacy. For example the Hindu Marriage Act, the Copyright Act, Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000 and the Code of Criminal Procedure all place restrictions on the release of personal information”.