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Predicting millions of voting choices. Deleting inconvenient voters. A world of manipulative possibilities could be opened by the government’s decision—controversially pushed through Parliament—to link Aadhaar, India’s national identity database, and election commission data. We report what investigations into two unresolved data leaks involving India’s current and Andhra Pradesh’s former ruling party revealed.
When A Anand, a political activist in Puducherry, received a message on his mobile phone early in March 2021 asking him to join Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in building “a new Puducherry”, it appeared at first to be an innocuous bulk SMS campaign.
When he clicked on a link in the SMS, however, he found that it was a carefully designed data-driven campaign by the BJP to herd prospective supporters to receive messages from the party a month ahead of the assembly election in the Union Territory.
The link asked Anand to join a BJP WhatsApp group of voters registered to cast their ballot at the polling booth in his locality. The WhatsApp group was named after the polling booth.
Anand’s family members and colleagues, too, received similar messages to join WhatsApp groups specific to their respective polling booths. Anand, who heads the Puducherry unit of the Democratic Youth Federation of India, found that only mobile numbers linked to Aadhaar, the biometrics-based 12-digit identification number of citizens, received the text message.
On 18 March, he filed a public interest petition in the Madras high court alleging that the BJP obtained personal details of voters, including Aadhaar numbers and phone numbers, without their permission, and that the party was “profiling” and targeting voters at the booth level using these pieces of information. He told the court that such profiling violated privacy and could lead to bribing voters by online money transfer, which is difficult to track, instead of the traditional vote-for-money cash handouts.
Read more- https://article-14.com/post/govt-has-cleared-linking-of-aadhaar-voter-data-past-experience-reveals-how-it-can-be-manipulated-61c937a621c09