How to keep your Aadhaar and PAN safely on your phone
Almost everyone in India is asked for Aadhaar and PAN again and again — for a SIM card, a bank account, a flat, a new job. So almost everyone has a photo of both on their phone. Here is how to keep them handy without leaving them exposed.
Is it safe to keep a photo of your Aadhaar in the gallery?
Not really. A photo in the gallery is the least protected place on your phone:
- Anyone you hand the phone to while showing them pictures can scroll straight past it — or stop on it.
- Every app you have allowed to see your photos can read it, and many apps ask for that permission.
- It is copied to wherever your photos back up, often without you thinking of it as “sending” your Aadhaar anywhere.
- It gets forwarded. A photo sent once on WhatsApp for a KYC is now in someone else’s gallery too.
An Aadhaar number with your name, date of birth, address and photo is most of what is needed to impersonate you in a KYC. A PAN card adds your father’s name and your tax identity.
Use masked Aadhaar wherever you can
UIDAI lets you download a masked Aadhaar, which hides all but the last four digits of the number. It is meant for exactly the everyday cases — a hotel check-in, a society registration — where somebody needs to see that you have an Aadhaar, not to record the whole number. Download it from the myAadhaar portal (myaadhaar.uidai.gov.in) by choosing the masked option.
The downloaded e-Aadhaar PDF is password protected: the password is the first four letters of your name as printed on Aadhaar, in capitals, followed by your year of birth. UIDAI treats e-Aadhaar as valid as the printed letter.
Three settings worth turning on
- Lock your biometrics in the myAadhaar portal or the mAadhaar app. Nobody can then authenticate with your fingerprint or iris until you unlock them.
- Use a Virtual ID (VID) where it is accepted — a temporary 16-digit number that stands in for your Aadhaar number and can be regenerated.
- Check your authentication history on the myAadhaar portal now and then, so you would notice a use you did not make.
When you have to share a copy
- Share the masked Aadhaar unless the full number is genuinely required.
- Write across the copy what it is for and the date — “For KYC with [company] only, 26 Sep 2026” — so it cannot be reused for something else.
- Send it to the person who asked, not to a group, and delete it from the chat afterwards.
- For PAN, the e-PAN PDF issued by the Income Tax Department is valid proof on its own, which saves photographing the card.
Where to keep them on your phone
Somewhere locked on its own, not just behind the phone’s lock screen. DigiLocker holds the official digital versions issued by the government. For the copies you use day to day — and for the photo of the card itself — a locked note or a document organiser app is far better than the gallery.
Document Organiser, for iPhone and iPad, recognises Aadhaar and PAN when you add them and reads their details — the Aadhaar number (checked against its checksum), name, date of birth and address; the PAN, name, father’s name and date of birth. The Aadhaar number stays masked to its last four digits until Face ID or your passcode reveals it, and a copied number clears itself from the clipboard within a minute. Everything is encrypted on the device, and any backup goes to your own iCloud, encrypted before it leaves.
Tidy up what is already out there
- Search your gallery for “Aadhaar” and “PAN” — on iPhone, Photos can search the text inside pictures — and delete the copies you do not need, then empty Recently Deleted.
- Search your chats and email for the same, and delete old copies sent for one-off KYCs.
- Delete old downloads of e-Aadhaar from the Files app once you have kept one copy somewhere locked.