Heena Sharma Blog

Should Aadhaar be used as KYC for social media accounts? We have recently seen a debate on this question with even the courts hearing arguments in favour and against such a move. The case began in Madras High Court and later Facebook moved the SC seeking transfer of the petition to the Apex court. The original petition was filed in July, 2018 and sought linking of Aadhaar numbers with user accounts to further traceability of messages. Before we try and answer this question, we need to first understand the differences between the different types of data on social media and messaging platforms. If a crime happens on an end to end cryptographically secure channel like WhatsApp the police may request the following from the provider to help solve the case: 1.Identity data: Phone numbers of the accused. Names and addresses of the accused. 2.Metadata: Sender, receiver(s), time, size of message, flag identifying a forwarded messages, delivery status, read status, etc. 3.Payload ...

Paytm Payments Bank , which was asked to halt on-boarding of new customers six months ago, is learnt to have resumed the process for signing up new customers after receiving the go-ahead by the Reserve Bank of India . Company’s founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma on Tuesday morning tweeted asking users to open saving accounts at the payments bank. “India’s most sincere bank is here. Welcome 2019 with revolutionary banking of Paytm Payments Bank,” Sharma tweeted an advertisement which has been placed in several newspapers. Back in June, after an audit it had done, the RBI had found lapses in the KYC process employed by Paytm Payments Bank. It also raised concerns around the sharing of financial data of Indian users between One97 Communications, a majority foreign owned firm, and Paytm Payments Bank. The Central Bank had also raised concerns on the credentials of Renu Satti, the then chief executive officer at Paytm Payments Bank, for leading the banking arm. Read More Busi...