Bengaluru techie Abhinav Srivastav arrested for accessing Aadhaar data

Abhinav Srivastav, 31, an IIT-Kharagpur graduate, has been arrested by the Bengaluru city police on the charge of accessing Aadhaar data, the police said in a statement.

The arrest made on August 1 followed a complaint filed against him by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) last week.

Srivastav, currently employed by ANI Technologies, which owns the Ola brand, as a software development engineer, has been accused of accessing Aadhaar information in January 2017 through an app named ‘Aadhaar e-KYC’, which was available on the Google Play store till recently.

Police said Srivastav had developed five apps and made ₹40,000 from advertisements displayed on them. Police are now scanning all his apps to see whether more violations were committed. The Aadhaar e-KYC app was downloaded over 50,000 times from the Google Play store since its launch in January, the police said.

City Police Commissioner T. Suneel Kumar said that based on the complaint, six teams of police comprising 26 personnel were formed to nab Srivastav and they tracked him down to Koramangala after a week. He has been accused of using the services of another app, ‘e-hospital’, which is listed as an authenticated user agency (AUA) authorised to access UIDAI data.

A senior police officer said there were around 400 entities that have been authorised to access the data for authentication. Srivastav’s company was not among those authorised.

A native of Kanpur, Srivastav completed his M.Sc. in Industrial Chemistry from IIT-Kharagpur and joined a private firm in 2010 as a security researcher. He launched Qarth technologies in 2012 and shut it down in 2016 owing to financial reasons. In March 2016, Ola announced that it had acquired Qarth and its mobile payments product, X-Pay. Srivastav then joined another private firm before joining ANI Technologies last year.

“Aadhaar related information, legally housed by the National Informatics Centre server, was illegally and without authorisation accessed and used to support this mobile application,” said the police statement.