The Supreme Court has put off until tomorrow a plea by Facebook seeking transfer to the apex court the petitions pending in different high courts across the country, demanding to interlink Aadhaar database with social media profiles for authentication of identity.

A bench of Deepak Gupta and Aniruddha Bose put the Facebook’s plea for consideration on Tuesday as the court wanted to go through additional materials placed before it.

Tamil Nadu will oppose the transfer as the matter pending before the high court had reached the advanced stage. Counsel for the state maintained before the court that it had earlier faced law and order problems several times and in one case, a girl had committed suicide after her face was posted on a nude photo and Facebook allegedly delayed giving information on the culprit.

In its plea, Facebook contended that two petitions filed in Madras High Court and one each in Bombay and Madhya Pradesh High Court contained the same prayer and seek same relief to “link Aadhaar information to social media accounts which would potentially allow for attribution of content to the person who posted such content”.

Transfer would serve the interest of justice by avoiding the possibility of conflicting decisions from four common cases.

Indeed avoiding conflicting decisions is particularly necessary here to ensure that users are afforded equal privacy protection across the country and to prevent an infeasible situation where the petitioner which operates uniform platform throughout India, is ordered to link Aadhaar information only for users in certain Indian states but not others,” it said.

—India Legal Bureau