UIDAI Unveils Privacy-Centric Aadhaar App, Begins Phase-Out of mAadhaar

India’s move echoes the 1936 roll-out of U.S. Social Security numbers—initially paper, later digitised in the 1980s—when a single identifier began underpinning both public and private services, raising parallel privacy debates. Since Aadhaar’s 2009 launch, the system has drifted from welfare targeting toward ubiquitous KYC, stoking concerns after high-profile leaks (2017 Tribune sting, 2018 state portals). The new app tries to reverse that narrative through data-minimisation, decentralised QR checks and user-side biometric locks—tools reminiscent of Europe’s post-GDPR “selective disclosure” credentials. If it succeeds, India could normalise zero-knowledge-style proofs for everyday transactions, nudging the world’s largest biometric database toward a consent-driven model. If it fails, it may entrench a surveillance architecture for the next century. Either way, the shift signals that digital identity battles—once about access—are now about who controls the data exhaust in a platformised economy that will outlast today’s phones and perhaps even Aadhaar itself.