Justice K.S.Puttaswamy(Retd) vs Union Of India on 26 September, 2018
guarantee against arbitrary State action. The pursuit of a legitimate State aim ensures that the law
does not suffer from manifest arbitrariness. Legitimacy, as a postulate, involves a value judgment.
Judicial review does not reappreciate or second guess the value judgment of the legislature but is for
deciding whether the aim which is sought to be pursued suffers from palpable or manifest
arbitrariness. The third requirement ensures that the means which are adopted by the legislature
are proportional to the object and needs sought to be fulfilled by the law. Proportionality is an
essential facet of the guarantee against arbitrary State action because it ensures that the nature and
quality of the encroachment on the right is not disproportionate to the purpose of the law. Hence,
the threefold requirement for a valid law arises out of the mutual interdependence between the
fundamental guarantees against arbitrariness on the one hand and the protection of life and
personal liberty, on the other. The right to privacy, which is an intrinsic part of the right to life and
liberty, and the freedoms embodied in Part III is subject to the same restraints which apply to those
freedoms.
311. Apart from national security, the State may have justifiable reasons for the collection and
storage of data. In a social welfare State, the Government embarks upon programmes which provide
benefits to impoverished and marginalised sections of society. There is a vital State interest in
ensuring that scarce public resources are not dissipated by the diversion of resources to persons who
do not qualify as recipients. Allocation of resources for human development is coupled with a
legitimate concern that the utilisation of resources should not be siphoned away for extraneous
purposes. Data mining with the object of ensuring that resources are properly deployed to legitimate
beneficiaries is a valid ground for the State to insist on the collection of authentic data. But, the data
which the State has collected has to be utilised for legitimate purposes of the State and ought not to
be utilised unauthorisedly for extraneous purposes. This will ensure that the legitimate concerns of
the State are duly safeguarded while, at the same time, protecting privacy concerns. Prevention and
investigation of crime and protection of the revenue are among the legitimate aims of the State.
Digital platforms are a vital tool of ensuring good governance in a social welfare State. Information
technologylegitimately deployed is a powerful enabler in the spread of innovation and knowledge.
312. A distinction has been made in contemporary literature between anonymity on one hand and
privacy on the other. [See in this connection, Jeffrey M. Skopek, Reasonable Expectations of
Anonymity, Virginia Law Review (2015), Vol. 101, at pp. 691-762.] Both anonymity and privacy
prevent others from gaining access to pieces of personal information yet they do so in opposite ways.
Privacy involves hiding information whereas anonymity involves hiding what makes it personal. An
unauthorised parting of the medical records of an individual which have been furnished to a hospital
will amount to an invasion of privacy. On the other hand, the State may assert a legitimate interest
in analysing data borne from hospital records to understand and deal with a public health epidemic
such as malaria or dengue to obviate a serious impact on the population. If the State preserves the
anonymity of the individual it could legitimately assert a valid State interest in the preservation of
public health to design appropriate policy interventions on the basis of the data available to it.
313. Privacy has been held to be an intrinsic element of the right to life and personal liberty under
Article 21 and as a constitutional value which is embodied in the fundamental freedoms embedded
in Part III of the Constitution. Like the right to life and liberty, privacy is not absolute. The
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