How big a problem is the current situation with the lack of a privacy law? I’m very clear that India needs a very modern privacy and data-protection law. And I’ve been saying this far longer than most people. Sometime in May of 2010, I wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that we should have a privacy law. And I followed that up. I asked Rahul Matthan (partner at Trilegal and a Mint columnist) and he helped. He worked with the department of administrative reforms and came out with a draft law and subsequently there was a committee under Justice A.P. Shah, and one of my colleagues (at UIDAI) Ashok Pal Singh was a member of that committee. They contributed to the framing of the principles. The only issue I have with the current narrative is, why should Aadhaar be singled out as a reason for the law? The biggest privacy risk that you have is your smartphone. A billion people will have smartphones as we go forward, their conversations will be recorded, their messages will b...
