"The point I was trying to make was that when it comes to security, privacy etc there isn't as much debate and media interest as I think should be in India."
Fair enough.
Note when I started this, Google was essentially one of the only players in this space who didn't want data that had PII in it (in the US, things like voter files get sold quite a lot). Still true, sadly
For national ID systems, most of it was something like "ID xxx through zzz vote at YYY". where xxx to zzz was some very large range. For those systems that required fine grained data (like Peru, I believe), our design was to give them secure one way hashes to use on the data before giving it to us so that we never had any info, just something we could key on (we would then proxy api calls to do the actual national id lookups or something so again, we never saw the id's)
AFAIK, none of these ever panned out for other reasons.
At least when I was running it (and i doubt things have changed in the past 8 months, it's the same people other than me), there was a zero percent chance we would have ever agreed to receive any "vital data" at all.
I haven't looked heavily into all this, but I have very strong doubts any info about people would have actually been asked for or given. You know how the press tends to understand nuanced technical detail.
In most cases where these stories happen, sad truth is the real reason is losing control of voter suppression.
Fair enough. Note when I started this, Google was essentially one of the only players in this space who didn't want data that had PII in it (in the US, things like voter files get sold quite a lot). Still true, sadly
For national ID systems, most of it was something like "ID xxx through zzz vote at YYY". where xxx to zzz was some very large range. For those systems that required fine grained data (like Peru, I believe), our design was to give them secure one way hashes to use on the data before giving it to us so that we never had any info, just something we could key on (we would then proxy api calls to do the actual national id lookups or something so again, we never saw the id's) AFAIK, none of these ever panned out for other reasons.
At least when I was running it (and i doubt things have changed in the past 8 months, it's the same people other than me), there was a zero percent chance we would have ever agreed to receive any "vital data" at all.
I haven't looked heavily into all this, but I have very strong doubts any info about people would have actually been asked for or given. You know how the press tends to understand nuanced technical detail.
In most cases where these stories happen, sad truth is the real reason is losing control of voter suppression.