Madras High Court Said That Linking Aadhaar With Social Media Accounts Was Not Possible

The Madras High Court said earlier this week that any linking between social media accounts and Aadhaar was not possible.

According to Justice S. Manikumar, linking accounts and emails to Aadhaar will break the Supreme Court’s original ruling, which states that the IDs could only be used for government welfare schemes.

This was the High Court’s response to two PILs (short for Public Interest Litigation) made in 2019 saying that:

The case’s scope is now expanded to WhatsApp to consider the possibility of tracing the senders of messages responsible for spreading fake news. The messaging app has said over and over again that doing so would violate the encryption that ensures users’ privacy.

The Court has made a similar answer in June to petitioners to rule out the practice of connecting social media sites to government IDs.

The 19^th of September will see the next hearing takes place. Facebook, the company that owns WhatsApp, has said to transfer all related case, including this one, to the Supreme Court. The plea hearing for the transfer will occur on the 13^th of September.

The last few years have seen several experts, activists, and technologists showing their opposition against Aadhaar – India’s identification program. The reasons they cite are problematic implementation, overreach, and concerns of privacy. However, nearly a year ago, the Supreme Court declared that the program was valid and constitutional.

The five-judge bench said that the program was necessary to make the marginalized section of the society possible and that it did not violate the privacy of Indian citizens.