Digiyatra and your privacy: Take the fall

By Aditya Trivedi

(Corporate, litigation lawyer
,New Delhi)

If you like looking into the mirror, then Digiyatra is for you! The mirror-mirror at the airport will trace you as you scan at the airport entry gate, CISF personnel gives a grin, as his workload is substantially reduced. There are a few Digiyatra staff, to assist. Artificial intelligence does need human assistance at this stage of human evolution.

Recently, Manish Tewari, Congress MP from Chandigarh raised concerns of privacy in Digiyatra application to the newly crowned civil aviation minister. The reply wasn’t convincing, neither to him nor to an avgeek like me, who has used Digiyatra more than an average passenger of this country. We, frequent flyers are disruptors. Airport coffees depend on us, sandwiches aren’t sold by themselves, it is we who are their loyal customers, even we do not know the reason.

What’s the privacy concern? Along with being an avgeek, I am a corporate and regulatory lawyer, let me take you through. Before doing that, understand it from a layman perspective. A passenger’s name and personal details, including Aadhaar (oh, it has its own privacy concerns, leave it for now) and flying details are saved with the application. I recently did some print outs from Blinkit, a quick commerce application, even it deleted the data after delivering the package. I expect better from the government.

So, the data is saved, with the government. A libertarian perspective allows us to ponder why government needs our data. Digiyatra can delete the data after one’s journey is over. There’s a long privacy jurisprudence in India. As you understand it from legal lens, imagine yourself standing in a ‘Digiyatra’ queue. Yes, there is a queue. People think Digiyatra was invented to eliminate queues. Yes and No. If one person in India is thinking to use Digiyatra to save time, there are millions like you, dear. I recently found myself in a ’Digiyatra queue’ for security check at the coveted Terminal-3 Delhi Airport. So, imagine yourself standing in that queue, and the person before you pass through the magical Digiyatra digital gate, you can clearly read their name. Alas! Government didn’t think this through before devising the application. No problem, there are always second chances.