India's Billion User Biometric Odyssey

mask.of.sanity writes "A bold new biometric identity system is being deployed across India in a bid to combat rampant welfare fraud. The mammoth system will collect the iris and fingerprint records on a voluntary basis of every one of India's 1.2 billion men, women and children. The Aadhaar project runs three trillion biometric identity matches every day — all on a small data center of commodity blade servers."

Comments

Re:4 years too old

[alexgieg]

This project started 4 years ago and is full of bugs and half ass procedures.

It's another classical example for the Chodorov Principle:

a) Government program A: mammoth welfare system;
b) Problem X caused by program A: rampant fraud;
c) Government program B for trying to solve problem X: mammoth biometric identity system;
d) Problem Y caused by program B: bugs, half ass procedure, political manipulation;
e) Government program C for trying to solve problem Y: throw more money at it, generalize it, make it mandatory hoping it'll start working as intended any time now;
f) Problem Z caused by program C: loss of privacy, identity fraud;
g) Government program D for trying to solve problem Z: ?

The Chodorov Principle reads thus:

"For every social problem A caused by government program X, problem A can be solved by abolishing program X."