Parliamentary panel to visit Bengaluru on October 28

The Joint Parliamentary Committee, deliberating on the Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill, is slated to visit Bengaluru, specifically the Unique Identification Authority of India’s (UIDAI) office in Bengaluru on October 28.

According to sources, the JPC is expected to review UIDAI’s security and privacy practices.

The JPC is headed by Lok Sabha member and former Union minister P P Chaudhary. The 30-member committee also has Bangalore South MP Tejasvi Surya.

Sources, familiar with the JPC’s Bengaluru visit, said the UIDAI might be asked questions on its authentication modes, especially the one involving facial recognition.

In August 2018, the UIDAI stated in a circular that it would roll out face authentication in a phased manner owing to the “non-readiness” of some device providers. Also, the UIDAI had stated that face authentication will be introduced as “secondary authentication factor to reduce the rate of authentication failures, especially for senior citizens” and that “face authentication will be used only in conjunction with another authentication factor such as finger/iris/OTP.”

According to the sources, facial recognition apparently uses an algorithm to measure the “liveness” of the face of a user, and if liveness is confirmed, the photo is sent to the UIDAI backend for authentication.

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