Khushi Mehrotra, Kushan Niyogi, and Shabbir Ahmed report:
The Greater Chennai Corporation has engaged a private agency to collect biometric data such as fingerprints and retina scans of thousands of residents in the city belonging to the lowest strata of society, without any discernible safeguards to protect this data. For several years, a firm called Impact Technologies has been engaged in collecting this sensitive data from poor and homeless residents who are potential beneficiaries of the Resettlement and Rehabilitation scheme of the Tamil Nadu Urban Habitat Development Board (TNUHDB). It has now emerged that the government has not framed any legal terms of reference for how the data is to be collected, stored or destroyed. What’s more, the DMK-led civic agency does not even have full access to the data of citizens collected by the private company.
Read more at The News Minute.