India has loosened restrictions in its Aadhaar authentication service, a framework for digital identity check, which is connected to the biometry of over 1.4 billion people to offer companies, including those that offer services such as e-commerce, travel, hospitality and healthcare , offer the confirmation system for authentication to authenticate your customers. The update has triggered data protection concerns because Neu -Delhi has not yet defined the guardrails that it would consider, to avoid the abuse of biometric IDs from individuals.
The Indian IT Ministry on Friday introduced The Aadhaar authentication for good government (social assistance, innovation, knowledge) change rules, 2025, to change the legislation introduced in 2020 as a result of a judgment of the Supreme Court restricted Access of private companies looking for Aadhaar data. The new change takes place almost two years after the Indian government started his public adviceThe answers to which were not disclosed.
The update aims to “improve the scope and usefulness of the Aadhaar authentication” by “enables the use of Aadhaar to improve the service provision” and “enables both state and non-state-owned companies to use the aadhaar authentication service take to provide various services in the public interest “and the provision of Aadhaar authentication services for the public interest,” public “, and the provision of Aadhaar authentication services”, “the provision of state services in the public interest” “The IT Ministry said in his press release.
Compared to their previous version, the changed rules excluded the sub-rules that enabled Aadhaar authentication to prevent the “desire for public funds”. This extends the scope of the unique ID-based review of the Indian identification authority of the Indian government (Uidai) and extends the authentication service to various public and private sectors. Previously, banking and telecommunications operators mainly used Aadhaar authentication to bring new customers on board and to check their existing consumers.
The Aadhaar authentication met 129.93 billion transactions in January, compared to 109.13 billion in February last year. per The Uidai website. The national computer science center, the national health authority, the State Bank of India, the Bank of Baroda and Punjab National Bank were the top companies that used the Aadhaar-based authentication to check their users this month.
According to the new rules, companies that enable Aadhaar authentication must “apply for the details of the intended requirements, the affected ministry or the department of the central or state government”, which are examined “by Uidai and Meice (the IT Ministry) that are checked by Uidai and Meity (the IT Ministry). This will approved these applications on the basis of Uidai’s recommendation, the government said.
“Which criteria that Meity and Uidai would take into account in order to rate such applications Kamesh Shekar, a digital governance lead at the Tech directive Think Tank the Dialog based in Neu-Delhi.
Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act 2016, which the Supreme Court had put down in 2018, enabled private units to use the Aadhaar numbers to determine the identity of the individuals. The Indian government changed the Aadhaar Act in 2019 to enable voluntary authentication based on Aadhaar. However, this change was questioned and is currently pending at the Supreme Court.
Prasanna S, a proponent of the record of the Supreme Court, who was one of the lawyers who fought for the right to privacy and had questioned the Aadhaar Act, said the attempts to change Section 57 to “again give” “.
“The license regime existed earlier according to the rules 2020. But now that access is expanded, concern about the type of regime is being reinforced several times,” he told Techcrunch.
Sidharth Deb, Associate Director of Public Order at the advisory company The Quantum Hub, based in New Delhi, said that the expansion of the Aadhaar authentication has the risk of exclusion.
“As soon as you can link ID documentation or ID instruments with access to digital services to link the exclusion,” he said. “We really have to think about how we voluntarily define so that the citizens have as much autonomy as possible in order to be able to access digital services in the best possible way as possible.”
Techcrunch has contacted the Indian IT Ministry about the most important concerns about the political experts and the existing measures to prevent Aadhaar abuse and is updated when the ministry reacts.
