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 ...

The Supreme Court on Thursday quashed the Madras High Court directive to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to grant 196 grace marks to students who suffered from the erroneous Tamil translation of 49 questions in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test ( NEET ) for undergraduate medical admissions. "The method adopted by the High Court is manifestly arbitrary and unjustified and cannot be sustained," the top court said in its judgement. The apex court observed that the court has made no attempt to see whether the students have in fact attempted answers to the questions, which were claimed to be imperfectly translated and has proceeded to award the full marks for 49 questions to all candidates who had opted to give the examination in Tamil. The court also directed that from the year 2019-20 onwards the NEET-UG Examination will be conducted by the National Testing Agency and the bilingual examination will be conducted after the question pape...