89 • • • amendments did not require the participation of Senate in their enactment. On the right to privacy, the court held that information privacy included rights of control a person had over personal information. That information would concern information which closely related to the person and was regarded as intimate and which a person would want to restrict collection, use and circulation thereof. Biometric data in digital form would be collected in NIIMS. It was defined in section 3 of the Registration of Persons Act as unique identifiers or attributes, including fingerprints, hand geometry, earlobe geometry, retina and iris patterns, voice waves and Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) in digital form. Biometric data by its nature provided information about a given person and it was personal information that was subject to the protection of privacy under article 31 of the Constitution. The personal data collected in the NIIMS Data Capture Form invited a risk of violation of the right to privacy in the event of inadequate protection measures. Personal data was intrusive if collected without a person’s knowledge or consent. When NIIMS data was collected, there was no legal requirement for consent by the subject. The rights of a data subject under sections 26 and 30(1) of the Data Protection Act included the right to object to the processing of his or her personal data and the right to give consent before his or her personal data could be processed. The data collection exercise undertaken pursuant to the impugned amendments was done with the consent of the data subjects. The biometric data and GPS coordinates required by the impugned amendments were personal, sensitive and intrusive data that required protection. The impugned amendments imposed an obligation on the respondents to put in place measures to protect the personal data. Under article 31 (c) of the Constitution, a violation of the right to informational privacy would occur when personal information was unnecessarily required or revealed. Therefore, the question to be answered was whether the collection of biometric data was necessary. Biometric data’s main utility was the identification of a natural purpose and it was necessary for identification purposes. The multi-modal nature of NIIMS was relevant to the extent that the system entailed the collection of different types of biometric data to improve its deterministic nature. The respondent demonstrated why the collection of different types of biometric characteristics was necessary. With the exception of DNA and GPS coordinates, information collected pursuant to the impugned amendments to the Registration of Persons Act was necessary and therefore not unconstitutional. The collection of DNA and GPS coordinates for purposes of identification was intrusive and unnecessary and it was unconstitutional and a violation of article 31 of the Constitution. Some of the stated purposes of NIIMS under section 9A were the creation of a national population register, the assigning of a unique identification number to every person registered in the register, and the verification and authentication of information on the identity of persons. It was thus principally an identification and verification system. To that extent, the biometric data collected was necessary to the stated purposes of NIIMS as it was clear that the system could only provide trustworthy information CITIZENSHIP AND NATIONALITY RIGHTS CASE DIGEST