Aadhaar has long been a lightning rod for the kind of privacy advocates who are often drawn to crypto and warn of the authoritarian threats from a government controlling such a large, centralized database of personal information. To that critique, the tech firms that built and now support India’s system have typically responded that they are overcoming the so-called “digital divide,” providing powerful, “programmable” IDs to the poor so that they can not only access the kind of services we take for granted but build new services on top of them.
