Following the Hon. Supreme Court’s Aadhaar verdict in September last year that disallowed private organisations from conducting Aadhaar-based e-KYC authentication, many organisations switched back to manual, paper-based KYC in order to comply with the SC judgment.
This rollback from e-authentication to manual authentication has resulted in organisations collecting the physical (print) copies of their customers’ Aadhaar cards. While most organisations have implemented robust data security mechanisms to safeguard the digital copies of their customers’ Aadhaar details, many of them fall short when it comes to securing the print copies of their customers’ Aadhaar cards.
As mentioned by the Hon. SC while pronouncing its judgment, authenticating entities (also known as ‘requesting entities’) have to duly process the print copies of their customers’ Aadhaar card before storing it in their database. This is unambiguously clear from the clause mentioned on Page No. 49 of the judgment that states that requesting entities have to mandatorily redact or black out the Aadhaar number displayed on the print copies of their customers’ Aadhaar card, and that only the redacted version can be stored by the requesting entities.
Taking cognizance of this, regulators like Insurance Regulatory And Development Authority Of India (IRDAI) have issued notifications mandating all Insurers to mask their customers’ Aadhaar number before storing the print / electronic copy of the Aadhaar card in their database.
We strongly believe that sooner or later, other regulators too will mandate their members to compulsorily mask their customers’ Aadhaar numbers with a view to bringing uniformity in the data security practices of all requesting entities.
As India’s leading Aadhaar-based e-KYC Solutions Provider, we are happy to inform you that we have developed a robust, highly-scalable Aadhaar Masking Solution that seamlessly supports both On-The-Fly masking as well as Batch Mode masking of Aadhaar numbers.
Feel free to get in touch with our colleague Amit Joshi on 9820875525 / 7208155528, or email him at amit@eastcs.com if you would like to know more about our Aadhaar Masking Solution.
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Regards
Team ECS.