Aadhaar - “Universal” identifier. Needed for pretty much anything. Including, apparently, buying jewellery.
Spain has a similar thing for this, you have to give your NIE/DNIe number everywhere. Like when ordering something online. But not in brick and mortar shops.
Still I find it a very poor practice in terms of privacy.
Government doesn’t operate in series on an issue one by one. This is why you have so many ministries in the govt. Just because roads don’t exist doesn’t mean govt should stop building railways and only think of roads.
In other words, privacy is a luxury that poor people can ill afford. Do poor deserve privacy? Absolutely. But it doesn't take much to get them part with their private data. They are stuck at the lowest level of Maslow hierarchy where as privacy is at least two level above them. Can government do something to protect their privacy? Probably, but I just can't see how it'll be successful when the citizens themselves don't care much about privacy.
I think this idea generalizes to other permissions too. Want to know my location? I hit the "placeholder" button and the app gets some generic location that never changes. Valid data flows through, so the app can work, but not my private information.
I have a number of stories for this. Indians are so used to this that sometimes people are shocked when I say no to sharing information that they request.
For example in a startup, the HR reached out on WhatsApp to all employees in a group and asked for certain documents and information etc.
About Truecaller: - It’s default opt in (with almost no way to opt out*)
- It requires access to your entire contact list - to mitigate this, I request Apple and Google to implement folders for contacts or something similar to how you can limit access to all photos on iOS per app. That way you can create an empty folder and share it with Truecaller
- It’s also impossible to change the wrong data that Truecaller somehow gets from some other contact list
My sibling recently got a new number and Truecaller assumed some other name and identity. Fellow Indians believe Truecaller more than they believe the person they are talking to (shows how much spam gets passed around)
This is NOT just TrueCaller. The same thing happens with Paytm and other payment apps.
Paytm for example assumed another identity and they requested us to submit multiple docs to prove our identity even though we never used the platform before. Even after multiple attempts and submitting multiple ids they refuse to change the data