WhatsApp To Foray Into Digital Payments With India's Controversial Aadhaar

Facebook-owned instant messaging app WhatsApp is mulling a foray into digital payment services in India (Editor's note: the link is paywalled; alternate source), its first such offering globally, and has advertised to hire a digital transactions lead in the country. From a report on The Ken: WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging app, is working quietly to launch person-to-person payments on its platform within the next six months, said four sources with knowledge of the matter. The initiative is seen as strategic for Facebook and currently being driven out of the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Its career page lists, among other roles, an opening for a digital transaction lead with knowledge of UPI, Aadhaar and BHIM, to be based out of Menlo Park. Aadhaar is a controversial database that has biometric information of more than 1.2 billion people in India. WhatsApp, used by over a billion people, has more than 200 million active users in India.

aadhaar is controversial because ...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Adhaar (and its cognates in other indic languages) mean proof. It is the first basic nationwide identity system being implemented in India. Till now there is no real proof of Identity in India. Anyone can call himself Eustace H. Plimsoll, of The Laburnums, Alleyn Road, West Dulwich and the judge has no way to check if the chap had been up before him or not.

People who used multiple identities for personal and tax reasons are opposed to aadhaar system, as are opposition parties. Especially the Congress par

Re:

[Luthair]

Anyone can call himself Eustace H. Plimsoll, of The Laburnums, Alleyn Road, West Dulwich and the judge has no way to check if the chap had been up before him or not.

You realize all brown people don't look alike? /coughs

Imagine 200 million credit cards being hacked

[PyRoNeRd]

This is a honeypot for hackers. Money on the internet has always being a nightmare, credit cards were never designed for the internet. It is going to cost a lots of fees for people to be reimbursed when their accounts are wiped out and their personal detals are stolen.

Aadhar - a good idea...

[bayankaran]

Aadhar may have flaky back-end systems, and will be exposed/leaked/hacked any day from now. (They use the super champion web-scale Mongo DB.)

Its a good idea, the benefits may outweigh the concerns. That said I do not know why they wanted bio-metric info other than the dudes championing Aadhar had big brother ideas. The ex CEO of Infosys - Nandan Nilekani - was heading Aadhar. He's one of those smart rich fools. He became popular among the East coast crowd when the other smart not-so-rich fool Thomas Frie

Honestly...

[thomn8r]

How many different payment platforms do we really need? It seems like were just laying down more attack surfaces.