Indian court upholds legality of world’s largest biometric database

• Keerthi Mohan
• 26 September, 2018

By: Keerthi Mohan

India’s top court Wednesday (26) upheld the legality of the government’s Aadhaar national identity project, the world’s largest biometric database, but imposed new restrictions on how the personal details of more than one billion citizens can be used. The ruling by a five-judge bench of the supreme court draws a line under many years of legal challenges from critics, who said Aadhaar threatened individual privacy and risked turning the world’s second-most populous nation into a surveillance state. The government had insisted Aadhaar, which issues every Indian with a unique 12-digit ID linked to fingerprints and iris scans, would streamline welfare…

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