https://uidai.gov.in/en/my-aadhaar/about-your-aadhaar/aadhaa...
This is what I referred. But never come across a situation where it was followed. Many cases were not progressing without aadhaar.
The Indian government is extremely duplicitous when it comes to AADHAR. On the one hand they claim it is not mandatory (to comply with the supreme court judgement no this) but on the other hand they make it impossible to get by without AADHAR.
Even private institutions use this duplicity to force AADHAR on everyone.
Sources: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/the-aadhaar-confu...
Let's accept this, AADHAR is the most friction-less process to get things done. And Private Institutions aren't going to spend extra to satisfy some errant ideology.
There is nothing "friction-less" about Aadhar. Even with Aadhar you still have to submit a bunch of other documents for getting anything done - even for a bank KYC.
Also, different department in the the govt treat AADHAR very differently. The govt circular states that the Aadhar cannot be used as a proof of birth date or citizenship - however, the election commission uses Aadhar as the proof of date of birth!
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/government-makes-citi...
Why didn't the govt simply issue a passport for people instead of issuing Aadhar cards? you need basically the same documents to apply for Aadhar as you would for applying for a passport - and the passport can be used for travel, as an ID proof, as a date of birth proof etc. So why have a separate process which duplicates all of this without any of the advantages?
Fro non-citizens, an equivalent residence permit with the aadhar number could have been issued.
The process for issuing passports already existed. So why recreate a completely new system?
Also, even with Aadhar, it has just become yet another entry you must mandatorily "link" to your accounts. you have to manually "link" your PAN to your bank account, your Aadhar to your bank account etc when the govt already knows which is your PAN and your AADHAR.
the errant ideology being “caring about your privacy”?
Forget financial transactions. You cannot book a temple visit online without giving aadhaar details of all devotees.
That's how ridiculously it is used when it is supposed to be used only in activities related to "consolidated fund of India".
Needed to get one for my passport. At that point, in 2017, it "wasn't required" but the state bureaucracy made it clear I wasn't getting it without my Aadhar card.
I got mine renewed without Aadhaar. Took 15 extra minutes, but it happened. That too at a tier 2 city (Dehradun).
Renewals, from what I heard, were difficult to hinder since you already had an official state issued document.
I got my passport in 2015 without one. Was surprisingly asked no questions about the lack of one.
The Aadhaar Act, 2016 is what gave the Aadhaar system it's teeth.
India is an expert at imposing oppressive laws and policies without thinking through them much.
What is the alternative for providing direct benefits without lossage?
A centralized ID makes it easier to verify identity, given that alternative local systems of identification were easily falsified and used to siphon money away from welfare programs by local politicians of all parties.
Before Aadhaar, to get your PAN card you often had to deal with your local panchayat, and that was often a compromised method with local panchayat functionaries requiring bribes or straight up ignoring individuals.
Furthermore, because the local level was so compromised, it was easy to create either fake IDs which was often used for siphoning funds.
Digital/Identity Libertarianism is a Veblen good when the absolute majority of the population is dependent on government benefits and subsidies.
> What is the alternative for providing direct benefits without lossage?
Accept the lossage. No system is foolproof, follow the Pareto principle and that's it.
Unfortunately that one is hard to sell to voters, especially as "we're going to eradicate fraud" is a very popular platform of conservative/authoritarian politicians that just use fraud as an excuse to develop repressive systems.
Pre-Aadhaar, 40-50% of overall welfare system distributions was lost due to corruption at the last mile [0]
At the end of the day, India's model of development is based on much more statist Japan, South Korea, and Singapore's, as most advising, developmental grants, and FDI in India is furnished by these 3 countries.
While India may speak English, it's administrative system and legal system is closer to Malaysia and Singapore's in jurisprudence and central control, and as such, administrative leadership in India tends to look at Singapore as a model - heck, Narendra Modi was mentored by Lee Kuan Yew when he was CM of Gujarat.
Aadhaar itself was developed in coordination with Singapore, and is directly based on Malaysia's MyKad and Singapore's NRIC.
Aadhaar has had disastrous pitfalls with rollout, but it is complete at this point - especially with COVID acting as a forcing function.
[0] - https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/176312/1/icrier-wp-2...
And what is the post-Aadhaar loss? Nobody knows, because there's no accounting. We're still in the "don't allow critical examination of Aadhaar" era of this regime.
Also, I got my COVID-19 vaccination without Aadhaar. It wasn't asked anywhere. I'm not sure what you're referring to as a connection between them.
There is no alternative afaik. The issues however are:
1. Friction in getting the card in the first place, especially in cases that are out of the ordinary.
2. Extensive and mandatory use of the card for routine non-governmental things that are not benefits or bank accounts. This is more pervasive than one may realize.
>2. Extensive and mandatory use of the card for routine non-governmental things that are not benefits or bank accounts. This is more pervasive than one may realize.
This is common in almost every country that has central ID system. Businesses want easy way to track someone using Primary Key that doesn't change. It's even bigger benefit to business if it's Primary Key that's same across all businesses.
Only way to prevent it is having laws that ban use of the number in business dealings but few countries have those laws.
Now the real fun begins when the primary key almost never changes, and is considered never-changing by most businesses and computer systems, but there is an extremely small number of cases when it does, in fact, change.
Poland is like that for example. Our PESEL number encodes gender by whether one of the digits is odd or even. People with a legally-sanctioned gender change get a new PESEL, and a lot of systems aren't prepared for that.
The Gender change process here is extremely long and arduous, and the number of transgender people was very low until recently, so most institutions weren't prepared to deal with it.
> This is common in almost every country that has central ID system.
Not true. The US has a Social Security Number but it is not needed for everyday business use. It is not needed for getting a cell phone number, for example. In India, the Aadhaa card is needed for getting a cell phone number.
It's required for getting postpaid cellular plan. It's also required to do banking so credit/debit card you give them, they likely can use that to backtrack.
Biggest one is probably health insurance. I'd be surprised if you can get any (private, employer-sponsored, ACA exchange, Medicaid, Medicare) health insurance plan without an SSN. Medicare at least makes sense since it is administered by the Social Security Administration.
It's required for getting postpaid cellular plan.
Nope. I got a new cellular device on a national carrier last year without giving up my SSN.
Plan, not device. If you have a plan, they have your SSN already and ran soft credit check likely when you bought your device.
It was a new plan, too. This is my first device with this carrier.
Right. If you are a rich country there is enough margin in business or resources for government agencies to use alternatives with people who don't provide SSN.
The total cost of implementing Aadhar system is less than couple of months of SSA admin expenses. Median per capita income tax in US is $15K and in India it would be 200-300 dollars. The point is at that level of revenue and expenses the quality of service, privacy, sensitivity to ones belief, one can expect from government is very low.
Complaining about Aadhar is more in tune of complaining about wine selection at Dollar store. This even if obviously true hardly rises to level of public welfare.
The US doesn't actually have a central ID system.
SSA is de facto used as one, but it isn't actually mandated.
The Aadhaar system is based on Malaysia and Singapore's National Registration ID Card (MyKad/IC respectively) system, as both countries had similar needs to India's for distributing benefits and validating identity.
Don't know the details but the cell phone number thing is due to terrorism reasons and mandated by the government, not due to individual businesses choosing to. Used to be you could just buy sim cards using cash.
You can get a SIM without an Aadhaar in India. I have one, and the author does have one as well.
It’s just that while it is legal to get one, each telco will make it extremely hard to do so.
I don't see any "oppression" here. All governments have personal data on its citizens. This is a fact of life. So far, the Aadhar data has been used for the benefit of society (like targeted assistance to people who deserve aid during Covid rather than doing "spray and pray")
> the Aadhar data has been used for the benefit of society
That's a partial view into it. It's also required for getting basic things that have nothing to do with the government, e.g. a cell phone number, and this is an example of the oppressive problem with it.
Making life difficult till you eventually do get one is a pressure technique to get everyone to conform to whatever it is you’re trying to impose.
Not sure what the right term’d be but it isn’t good nevertheless.
are you aware of the sale of Aadhar biometric data on the internet? There have been so many leaks at this point that it is borderline funny.
In good faith, how can you look at that and say that Aadhar data has been used for the benefit of citizens?
Despite often being "not mandatory", reality will disagree with you.
I’d say implementation issues shouldn’t influence our decision on whether an identity credential is fundamentally required or not for the country.
Ah, yes. The difference between theory and practice doesn't matter when it is one's pet theory being discussed.
I’m all for privacy but fail to understand what the authors fundamental beef is with Aadhar. Sounds better as a system to me than what the US has.
He chooses not to use it on privacy grounds. But, this is a common problem with most national identity databases tbh. Its more likely a political decision than a privacy one.
Not just for privacy, but broken processes and duplicitous technological claims. It doesn't solve the problems that people assume it does. It does solve other problems, which is why there's so much enthusiasm for enforcing it.
But it's hard getting mainstream attention for how these are different sets of problems.
In Canada, the government successfully requested banks to freeze accounts of peaceful protestors.
Once an increasing share of your transactions with society become connected by an ID number, it is becomes trivial to limit your freedom.
Isn't social security number in many countries widely used, especially where it matters (insurance, banking, pension, etc.?). So we have a better solution? There are some privacy preserving IDs (self sovereign IDs), but I think to get such services, you still need a central ID?
Just curious: why doesn't this person have an Aadhaar number? Is it because he doesn't want one for ideological reasons, or is there some class of people for whom getting one is difficult or impossible?
It's ideological for him (he's a relatively well known entrepreneur and privacy advocate) but there are classes of people for whom getting an Aadhaar number is difficult for practical reasons: homeless individuals, nomadic and migrant workers, remote tribal communities, refugees, elderly people who were born before reliable record keeping in their region, and transgender people.
Interesting and makes sense, thanks. I’m not Indian so I had never heard of this before today.
Kiran was instrumental in getting a strong net neutrality regime in India, so he's a pretty effective activist too. (I've met him a couple of times.)
I don’t think it is appropriate to dismiss concerns around privacy and authoritarianism as “ideology”.
I didn't dismiss anything. Ideology is not necessarily bad.
Aadhaar has come into existence to facilitate direct benefit transfers to eligible recipients of state and national level welfare schemes.
This is necessary because of massive corruption in distribution of wealth in such schemes, where the actual beneficiary gets just 20 bucks or so for very 100 bucks allotted by the govt.
It has slowly transformed into an identity in itself, which is wrong. However, with 1.5 billion people, what other alternative is there? Any and all solutions end up looking like a centralized identity system.
correct. the problem is not that aadhar is being used for DBT by goverment. The problem is coercion when it is not mandatory.
Someone who's not from India might say, biometrics and centralized IDs are great tools to offer benefits to citizens. This is true, but when it is not, when a government is not trust-worthy, because of its own history of doing things this way.
They said that all your other IDs will be made invalid if you don't "opt-in" to Aadhaar. They essentially blocked you from using all pre-existing, valid IDs. They now in this ingratiating way ask us, don't you see the convenience?
There are a very large number of people from whom biometrics cannot be collected, or cannot be reliably collected (meaning they change rapidly):
1. Newborn babies (who are all issued Aadhaar without biometrics) 2. Children (rapid change) 3. Old people (fading eyes, wrinkled skin) 4. Workers handling harsh materials (smoothened fingertips) 5. Disabled people (missing fingers) 6. Visually impaired (iris scans won't work)
Biometrics are optional in the design of Aadhaar because all these classes have to be accommodated. But in practice? How do you distinguish between "unable to provide biometrics" and "refusing to provide biometrics with fraudulent intent"? Who makes this determination in each case where biometrics are required?
The design of Aadhaar also imagines that the machine is more reliable than the human authority using the machine, so the human does not need be trusted and government can therefore outsource citizen interactions to non-gazetted officials (ie, cheaper for the govt), who no longer have the authority to override the process when biometrics cannot be used.
This destruction of government accountability is the problem. This is the other half of the Aadhaar project. It's not just an innocent technological system, it's one that was explicitly conceived and funded as a way for one ideology within government (neoliberalism) to dismantle an older socialist ideology, without any thought for what happens to the technologically-excluded.
i used to be in the same ideological camp as the op in the beginning. but after seeing how many processes one takes for granted elsewhere got sped up with the new system, you really need to evaluate your overall opinion about this.
having lived as an outsider in other countries, many considered as beacons of public freedom, i found a universal id system in almost all of the cases. there were also some cyclical dependency issues that are hard to break without having one by just getting it done for you by your parents or something. this is where i struggle to understand why in those contexts an id like this is completely acceptable but not for indians?
i do still agree on the front that this is not a bulletproof system, and misuse/abuse still exists. the local tax id (pan) is no longer accepted as valid id because in the past many got it made through non-legit means. but when non-person entities (from pets to deities) are sometimes assigned one in one-off cases, there can be some skepticism on the original goal for the project.
about biometrics, that argument seems weak coming from those who are expats and gave up theirs for their visas. but the one about mandating it to all is something i'd personally thought to stop thinking too much about.
The article doesn't make an argument around biometrics. Biometrics are needed even for getting a passport or registering a property purchase, but notice how those are never brought up in any argument around Aadhaar's use of biometrics, whether arguing for or against.
Procedural speed-ups are not because of the technology of Aadhaar, but because of the regulatory regime favouring it. The same fast processes also work without Aadhaar wherever there's been regulatory pushback against mandatory Aadhaar. For instance, video KYC works just fine without Aadhaar, and CKYC with just PAN also does instant KYC.
These are procedural decisions, not technological improvement with Aadhaar. Dig into how it works and you'll find that the technology isn't even where they claim it is.
i mentioned biometrics as historically it used to be a major point against the entire system. it is equally interesting to note that this aspect is no longer discussed as much.
we need to yet again stress on the universal part of the system. PAN might have KYC benefits, but keep in mind that there were about 67.7 million tax returns filed this year [1] compared to 1.42 billion or so living in the country. so assuming that everyone can benefit from PAN or other ID systems that are applicable for specific use cases is not enough to reach everyone.
whatever mix resulted into what Aadhaar is today, there are affordances that this allows that were previously not possible. keeping in mind that this has been a bipartisan effort, if there was indeed an existing system they could have improved, there should have been enough political and industrial will for it.
i just personally come to better appreciate it in hindsight now.
[1] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1944...
Biometrics are not discussed much these days because Aadhaar is no longer a strictly biometric id – either at enrollment or in usage.
Biometrics are not collected for toddlers and not considered reliable for under-15s, and that segment was about 30% of the population in the 2011 census. An unknown number have never updated Aadhaar to add biometrics.
Biometric auth fell into disuse with the shift to mobile internet. The government tried strong-arming Apple and Google into taking fingerprint scanners out of the hardware secure zone so they could send scanned fingerprints (minutiae) to UIDAI servers. That didn't work, so they tried coaxing OEMs to make Aadhaar phones with a second fingerprint reader. TRAI – whose chairman 2016-2020 was the ex-UIDAI head – even tried framing it as "device neutrality" borrowing from European app store regulation. None of that worked, so they just moved from biometrics to SMS OTPs for rich people, while continuing to harass poor people for it.
Aadhaar as a unique id was always a galaxy-brained idea when there's no biometrics for children, no removal of dead people, and confusion of uniqueness in an identity scheme vs uniqueness in a much smaller welfare scheme where there's always surplus population who will never notice identity theft.
The only good thing about Aadhaar is the card – it's given people a document that's near-universally accepted. But the Aadhaar card is an organic development that was not part of the original design – where the card was merely meant to be a receipt delivered via the post as a probe to confirm the address – and remains an afterthought in the narrative. Even today you'll find Aadhaar proponents who don't understand how the card is a very different thing from the digital id they associate Aadhaar with.
How is this different than a social insurance number/drivers license number?
It is very hard to do business with, or deliver services to someone when you cannot verify their identity.
SSN is not an Identity Document, and the collection of Biometrics: https://rethinkaadhaar.in/faqs/ssn
A DL number can change over time, as your license gets renewed - an Aadhaar is by design meant to remain with you through your lifetime.
The equivalent of a US SSN in India is PAN, the Permanent Account Number issued as a tax identifier, for both individuals and other tax-paying legal persons.
It has been in use for decades prior to Aadhaar.
apropos to this.
You can pretty much google up and download millions of Aadhar directly from the web.
I have a six letter Gmail email and get emailed tens of aadhar cards a year.
Good article about the woes in India to preserve privacy amidst the combined onslaught of government surveillance and surveillance capitalism. My mother's pension account was frozen for many months for not providing her Adhaar Id. I had to finally threaten legal action to ensure she could access her bank account again. We were lucky that we were well-off and my mother could live without her pension for many months, but such actions can make the financially-constrained really desperate.
If you want to make life difficult for yourself another way, you should try interacting with the Indian bureaucracy without a local mobile phone number.
To be fair that's true in any country.
UK.gov happily sends OTPs to my US mobile number; nor was it my experience in Japan that I had problems.
I think it's really patchy at least in the US -- even if the SMS backend supports international numbers the database or UI might just not support them.
Well...
Digital identities are a natural step since we need to digitalize the society and so we need to have digital IDs like we need physical ones.
The point though it's another, or when imposing them and how. In a country where 99% of homes could be connected and most have already internet access, where a large slice of population use computers every day, so elderly typically have relatives who can help, and those who really need help are few enough there is no problem helping them directly it's a thing. Imposing them (even worse than de jure, but de facto) in a country where a large slice of population have not even a home with an address and ordinary services it's definitively another.
India's digital strategy, the 100 smart city program etc are just fascist move to cut off a large slice of population for whom the ruler count to have no option to accommodate in a new society. And it's not much different than various imposition we witness in the west, a small step at a time, more softly.
we need to digitalize the society
Why?
Economy, quickness, simplicity, effectiveness, comfort.
Let's say you have a smart-card as a digital ID, you need a new one because the one you have is expiring. With classic model you go to a certain office in a certain timeframe to do that. In a digital world you order the new one from you desktop, being identified enough, you can than take a photo directly from your cam, then via mail you get the new one, you confirm you have it in hand with the card itself and you get a new pin. Done. The same if you lost an ID. There is no need to force smartphones crapplications and alike to be digital.
Then you have your health infos in the health system of your country, any doctor with your ID and their own could access all your relevant records.
At a supermarket you can prove your identity simply passing the card on a reader, the sole data share is "you can buy alcohol or not".
To open an account with a bank, you just authenticate yourself to a public system that gives the banks the relevant data they legally need and nothing more, you know they could ask for something else but all requests are optional.
You purchase a home? You can sign the contract from remote with your ID. You can retrieve the relevant docs at any time from the relevant public administration as a PADES signed pdf/a and so on.
All these things simplify life and reduce time and cost spent in doing anything.
Of course yes, the same passage could be used to act against you in a dictatorship and so on, but the bar is simple: knowing the tech means imposing furor populi a good one, so for instance smart cards and not smartphone craplications, for instance IDs, not "digital wallets" and so on. Try to keep the old system means leaving few interested party pushing their own favorite solution against all others interests. As have always happened...
I think we should introduce as much friction as possible for the government to track us across businesses
In a Democracy we are the Government, do you prefer being tracked by Alphabet or Apple or Huawei thanks to their macro-bugs aka smartphones most people bring with them even on a WC?
With MANDATORY FLOSS and open hardware while we can't know what's really inside a CPU etc we are safe enough to know the supermarket only know we are major age and the government do not know much else. And we get trained Citizens who know tech a bit.
Instead today Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Alphabet, Meta, Tesla knows MUCH MORE about us without any control for us and without a general awareness on that. Are you more afraid by the small info footprint of a smart-card based digital ID or about cam and mic with GPS whenever you go?
No, we don't NEED to digitalize society. We could due with less digital things for the betterment of society.
To achieve such result you need to digitalize for real. Here in the EU the current state of things is crappy because most do not want digitization and that's so happen driven by few interested parties. So instead of having a smart card per document we have a complicated three-level system handed to the private sector, we have not much coherent digital invoices, an economist have even suggested to create "a virtual State to simplify things", we have certified mails in some countries so badly designed you can't keep then for sure for 10+ year and so on.
If people instead of pretend to stop the history train embrace it and impose a certain conduit we could have much better things with much less complicates crappy bureaucratic choices for the sake of few against the other. Try to keep parts of a paper-based world in a bit-based society we already are, it just trying to be Luddites ending as the original ones... A small example: we end up in de facto mandatory smartphones for all simply because only very few have battled to have smart-cards and some are interested in imposing macro-bugs to the whole population. The whole population have tried to ignore the evolution, keeping the paper and they end up with a (cr)app instead of a good smart card.
The problem is that most user facing staff (like car dealers etc) have been trained in exactly one path for form completion and Aadhaar is on that path.
So you end up spending a lot of time educating these people, who aren’t really interested in the ideological issues.
same in US with SSN everything is difficult.
The SSN equivalent is PAN, not Aadhaar.
> "The stated goal of Aadhaar is noble, of giving every individual an identity, ..."
[Semi-offtopic] Just my favorite pet peeve: Identity cannot be given - it's an inherent, innate property of the individual. Or a group. So, as I get it, Aadhaar is not an identity, it's a credential ("ID" is not a great term). Government (or anyone else other than oneself) doesn't give anyone an identity, they merely authenticate your identity and issue or certify a credential.
Language is a mess, and that's why I felt important to leave this comment - just to put my two cents against all the confusion that already exist out there. I recently saw a joke that says "auth" is short for "it's either authentication or authorization but I don't remember the difference right now" and it seems so relevant :-)
And, yes, I believe the term "identity provider" is a perversion of nature - a blatant attempt at what should be called "identity theft" (instead of what the industry calls "identity theft").
An “indentity” on this context is the opposite of something innate to an individual: it is the fact that everyone sees you as a single person (as opposed to whatever name you give when introducing yourself), in is fundamentally a social tool.
You don't need such an identity to live alone on a desert island, or in a remote village where everyone knows each other, but it's a necessity in highly mobile modern world where you mostly interact with people who know nothing about you except this identity.
Thank you. I agree that identity a social concept - I'm not sure there is a need for identities without a society.
However, I believe you're confusing "identity" and "identity document".
Identity document (which is fundamentally different from identity itself) is a social tool too, serving the purpose you've mentioned - consistently identifying someone to the society as a single person.
However, what I wanted to point out that it is absolutely not an identity, but rather a credential. That's not how it's typically colloquially called, but that's what it factually and effectively is. (Of course, please let me know if I'm wrong.)
Making a passport or some online account an actual identity is a true "identity theft" - an attempt of the modern world to take over human identities. And I really don't like this trend. I can't really put it well, but something about it is deeply unnerving to me, it's just so philosophically wrong. Hope you can see it.
Oh, and I specifically want to clarify: absolutely nothing wrong with governments issuing documents, of course! Just please, for the love of all that's still sane in the world, don't call such documents an "identity" - it is really not.
And that's the only reason I'm so anal about this - language shapes reality, and identities are already quite messed up, so I thought I'd try to point it out. Sure, I'm pissing against the wind here (and I'm bad at expressing my thoughts well), but I have to try.
I'm not sure you can really separate concepts and their practical embodiment in this world.
To expand on your example, when you get your passport stolen and someone gets a credit in your name, it's not just the document that has been stolen but very well your identity as seen by society: now the entire society (in practice the bankers and law enforcement, maybe your employer or eventually even your neighbors) think that you own the bank some money, and the bank will leverage their legal power to recoup their money from you.
And respectively, if the state you live in decides that Aleksei Deaman* doesn't exist, removes all traces of you from official records and declares that all identity document you have are counterfeit ones, then you lose your identity pretty much instantly: your bank will close your bank account, your insurance doesn't cover you, including your housing loan, and your employer cannot keep you because you are now assumed to be an illegal immigrant. At the end of the day your life is pretty much ruined, not just because you've lost your identity papers, but because your entire social identity has been taken away from you.
The less familial and based on mutual trust a society is, the more the distinction between “identity” and “identity papers” is blurred. (Not saying that it's a good or a bad thing, that's just what it is).
> it's not just the document that has been stolen but very well your identity as seen by society
Yes, and that's also very wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15346081 (the article link died, but it's still available at https://medium.com/securitybytes/quick-one-stop-calling-it-i...)
> but because your entire social identity has been taken away from you.
I totally agree with all you say, factually - yea, if the state decides I no longer exist, I'm pretty much fucked, pardon my language.
Except that - if we use correct terms - I don't lose my identity, I lose authorization because my credentials are revoked (or erased) and so no one formally or legally recognizes me anymore.
The identity is still there, though. Even the "social identity" - if we look at the original social identity theory, if I get it right, it's a self-concept, derived from one's own perceived membership in some social group. The social identity will be only "lost" (or, rather, transformed into something different) when I mentally process the erasure and stop believing I'm a part of the society I used to be a part of, and maybe start living and associating with somewhere else. Which is going to happen pretty quick in the outlined scenario, of course. But even though the factual outcome is the same - the semantics are whole lot different. And I believe that's really important.
Not using the correct terms is exactly the issue that irks me so much. If we start believing (most people already do) that "identity" is something that is provided to us by society, that our passports are our identities, it gradually leads us to decisions that we wouldn't have made otherwise, because things sound okay - but they only do because the language was perverted in a way to make them sound so.
> If we start believing (most people already do) that "identity" is something that is provided to us by society,
But it is: first of all you didn't even chose the name you're bearing right now, society did it for you : your parents chose your first name among the list of socially cool/acceptable name in the context you were born in, your last name was given to you according to socially decided rules (patrilinearity, Zhukov/Zhukova, etc.). Then there's your job, from which we derive a significant part of our identity (note how we say “I am a software developer”).
> it gradually leads us to decisions that we wouldn't have made otherwise
We don't exist in a vacuum, most of the decisions we take every day, big or small, are shaped by the society we live in, no matter if you believe “that our passports are our identities”. The reason why you put an alarm clock to extract you from your bed this morning isn't because you believe in passports, but because you committed to, and this commitment is a big part of your identity: it shapes how much you sleep, how often you see your parents or play with your kids, it even shapes how much you have sex.
Then of course you can argue that “your life” and “your identity” aren't the thing, thinking about the “identity” as some kind of abstract, immutable, thing that's attached to any individual (= the soul), but I don't think this thing really exist: we are the life we live.
First of all, thank you for your comment, again.
> first of all you didn't even chose the name you're bearing right now
Oh, well, it just happens I actually did. When I naturalized, I literally picked my legal name (making some adjustments). I contemplated going as "Alex" (I use it as an informal name sometimes), but kept "Aleksei" just because I felt more like it.
Even "Aleksei" is a choice (to some extent) - while society had dictated how it was spelled out in my old passport, I still had a choice of how I write it when I introduce myself. Quite a few people I know use names that are different from their legal names for themselves.
We don't typically chose names we're bearing as kids, for obvious reasons. However, in reasonably progressive societies, we do have a choice regarding our names (most don't exercise it, keeping names as they were, but they still have an option) when we're adults.
> Then there's your job, from which we derive a significant part of our identity (note how we say “I am a software developer”).
That's not exactly right again - software development isn't there because it's my job. I've been pushing those Omnissiah-blessed (or cursed) buttons since I was five or six, so it's truly a part of who I am. Been like that way before I even got my first job.
I wouldn't have put my job title ("Senior Engineer II") in the description, since I don't normally refer to myself that way. Some people do, of course - their identity, their choice how they present it.
> The reason why you put an alarm clock
Is probably not what you think, either. ;-) Yes, it's a commitment, but a very voluntary one - one of my cats has diabetes and he needs his pills and an shot of insulin. Plus, my overall health gets somewhat worse if I don't maintain normal diurnal schedule.
I'm obviously very privileged here, but one of the [many] reasons I work for a company I work for, is flexibility I negotiated upfront - because I needed it for personal reasons. Again, it was me making that call, consciously ignoring the workplaces (= parts of the society) that don't work for me that well, and looking for the parts that do.
And please don't get me wrong - I'm not bragging here or anything like that. It's just stating historical events - reading your comment made me remember things and realize they were quite different. I honestly wish everyone would be as privileged as me to be able to do the same: live their lives as much to their liking as the world allows it.
> we are the life we live.
I completely agree with this. Using formal terminology, identity is a description of self-concept, and if I get it right, self-concept is made of self-schemas, which are - simplified - a memories of our own lives.
> We don't exist in a vacuum, most of the decisions we take every day, big or small, are shaped by the society we live in
Oh, I think I see - we're basically talking something like individualism vs communitarianism at this point?
I absolutely agree that coexistence with others (living in a society) means that our actions (and thus our identities) are greatly influenced by society. I find it ironic that my semi-liberal views on identity are definitely shaped by living a part of my life in a pseudo-collectivist society that I found disgusting. I'm not a libertarian, but I - quite selectively - like John Locke's "every man has a Property in his own Person" idea very much.
And despite society playing huge role in forming identities, I still think I believe in individual volition as the ultimate factor. Assuming free will is a thing, haha. We may have limited options that we don't like - that's life - but - as I think - we still always make our own decisions. Otherwise concepts like "responsibility" stop making sense.
So, ultimately, I'm all for the idea that I say "Hey, I'm Aleksei" and that's who I am, rather than society telling me "You are Aleksei". Societies can be very different. And if the society is [subjectively] good for some individual, society should have no problem with individual expressing themselves, right? And I just wouldn't like anyone to be stuck in a bad place - but if they are, in bad places, our own minds are always our very last bastion - and I think it's important to stand for it.
Hope I understood your comment correctly, and that my reply makes sense.
I should also point out that Aadhaar in fact attempts to capture identity itself, not merely issue a document. The founding management articulated it as a "digital atma (soul)", and the card that people use as a document today was originally meant to be a postal probe to confirm the address by delivering a receipt containing the assigned number (the only way to receive it).
That ridiculous ambition led to their many stupid choices and to further perversion as no other government department could understand what this was and how to use it, so they all invented their own usage processes – with enough loopholes to severely damage its utility as a credential.
Correct, and my original draft had several paragraphs attempting to explain this, but this article was going into the print edition of the newspaper where they have a very hard limit on space. All of it got dropped.
Here is my 2017 attempt at articulating it in the context of Aadhaar: https://medium.com/karana/aadhaars-implicit-patriarchy-a0168...
It is an identity though. That's why it's managed by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
The Indian government de facto treats Aadhaar as the primary form of identification within India in the aftermath of the inability of Indian forces in Ladakh being unable to identify Pakistani nationals from Indian nationals during the Kargil War, as well as the broken and disjointed identification process in India that used a mix of voter ID rolls, village/panchayat rolls, and other lossy methods.
> It is an identity though. That's why it's managed by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
Sorry, I could be wrong, but I cannot agree here. It's an identity document ("ID"), something that documents an identity (so, a credential), not an identity itself.
Put simply: identity document ⊂ credential* ≠ identity.
I really don't like the term "ID" - specifically because it leads to this kind of confusion (and this leads to all sorts of problems), but it's too well established out there...
And I totally get the goal of Aadhaar (or most government-issued identity documents for that matter); my comment was unrelated to India (which is why I marked it as semi-offtopic) but solely regarding the language in the article.
*) Note: "credential" is a wider term: all identity documents are a form of credential but not every credential is an identity document. I originally put "=" between ID and credential, but edited it later for clarity.
Fair enough. I think it's a semantic argument, but words can have an overloaded meaning. In colloquial English, identification can be treated as credentialing as well.
> I think it's a semantic argument
Exactly! And all I wanted to say is "Please don't use harmful semantics, even if a lot of people do so because it's convenient or widespread. Your identity is yours, no one can give it to you or take it from you, it is simply who you are - don't let others believe otherwise and don't let others switch the meaning."
Gradual acceptance of such quirks leads to gradual transformation of thought and erosion of identity. And that leads to all sort of bad things.
yikes :/ that’s gonna be the entire world in the future
The relentless march of government surveillance and surveillance capitalism will ensure that eventually we will have Global Citizen ID.
They'll pretend that it's not mandatory while the entire system conspires to make life more and more difficult for those who oppose and resist it, until it becomes impossible to live in society without it.
Remind me in 5~10 years.