Personal safety of voters will not be in risk due to sharing parts of NID info: Minister Palak

State Minister for ICT Zunaid Ahmed Palak has said no bank or financial institution will be able to get a person’s “secret information”, provided for the National ID cards.

Only certain information which are necessary for cross verifications will be made available to those institutions, the minister has clarified.

The minister was speaking at the 'Dialogue on Safer Internet' organised by bdnews24.com on Saturday.

The discussion was moderated by the news portal’s Editor-in-Chief Toufique Imrose Khalidi.

Law enforcement agency RAB’s Director General Benazir Ahmed also gave assurance of protecting secret information.

The Election Commission has built the national data centre with personal information of 95 million voters.

The EC has recently signed a contract with two private banks on providing them information from the data centre so that they can cross check the identity of an account holder.

The Commission earlier also signed similar contracts with the Bangladesh Bank, National Board of Revenue, and passport department in order to stop forgery and track criminals.

Such contracts will also be signed with 30 more private banks and financial institues.

During the interactive dialogue, which was telecast by Ekattor TV and broadcast live on bdnews24.com, a viewer asked Palak through Twitter, if it was safe and reasonable to provide citizens’ personal information to any individual or privately owned institute.

The state minister said there was no risk involved in it.

“No NID information has been transferred. Only some selected information from the Election Commission’s data centre are available to them (banks),” he said.

He said it was wrong to assume that all the personal information were being transferred.

“The data are being shared to identify the correct person. There is nothing to fear. We’ll make arrangements to ensure cyber security for all,” he said.

Another panellist RAB chief Ahmed said, “There are two types of information on NIDs. One of them can be shared with all and the other is secret.

“The NID information provided to the banks and financial institutes are general information of an individual or information that are in public domain, not the secret part,” he added.