Ranjit Singh: The Curious Case of Tweeting an Aadhaar Number

Singh’s talk explores the data security practices of Aadhaar, India’s, biometrics-based national identification number, and the co-constitution of trust and mistrust that underlies its operation as a public data infrastructure. Based on 18-months of multi-sited ethnographic research, Singh presents tensions around whether Aadhaar numbers were designed to be disclosed publicly or kept confidential. Practices meant to promote the sharing of Aadhaar numbers broke down with growing anxieties over their public disclosure on government websites, lack of audits, and emerging forms of Aadhaar-based frauds.

In response to this rising mistrust, an ex-member of Aadhaar’s design team publicly disclosed his number in a tweet that went viral. Singh uses this tweet as a point of departure to: (1) provide an account of infrastructural concerns (grounded in design choices and events) that transformed Aadhaar from a public to a confidential number; and (2) illustrate that this transformation reflects how trust and mistrust co-constitute Aadhaar’s data security practices. Singh concludes by illustrating how infrastructural concerns produce a spectrum of possibilities where identity numbers are public and confidential, trusted and mistrusted, at the same time.

Ranjit Singh is a researcher at “AI on the Ground”, Data & Society Institute. His research interests lie at the intersection of data infrastructures, global development, and public policy. His current research projects invigorate existing efforts to reframe the Global South as home to the majority of the human population and investigate the diverse ethics, politics, and experiences of living with and regulating data and AI.

His dissertation research at Cornell University focused on data-driven marginality and the challenges faced by citizens in claiming voice and representation through data in the biometrics-based, data-driven organization of welfare services in India.