According to a 2021 report World secrecy platform160 countries collect biometric data for national ID systems. However, critics argue that these systems often become state monitoring equipment, which induce risk to privacy and oblivion. Their data ecosystems are often unsafe and irregular, including many private and public actors, networks and databases. This creates opportunities for private actors to access personal data, making them an attractive goal for malicious hackers.
While the purpose of using biometric ID for voter authentication is to prevent repetition of voters, curb election fraud and increase voter participation, A 2022 Brookings Research Argued that the usefulness of these systems depends on the context in which they are deployed, such as the electoral management body of a given country, pole policy and training, civil education and voter trust and freedom of overall cost.
“Election management bodies often do not have expertise or resources to design and implement their own biometric systems and thus depend on private actors to establish and manage these systems. These private actor further complicates the information ecosystem, in which personal data is transmitted,” The author of this research has been a writer Patric Jones.
In the case of India, the biometric system (Aadhaar) was developed by a statutory body UIDAI under GOI.
