With the increasingly greater adoption of social media by the global population, protecting our privacy is paramount. We tend to put up pictures, share stories, notes, posts etc. without knowing exactly who can see these. However, sometimes you end up sharing stuff you never really intended to. In such situations, that unintentional share might make your picture, post, video, whatever, available to an exceedingly large network on the internet. Nightmare, isn’t it?
Recently, this nightmare became all too real for the Bengaluru police department when 46,000 phone numbers of private citizens were posted onto their Twitter handle, accidently!
The numbers were of all those people who called ‘100’ via the ‘Suraksha’ app to file complaints since April 2015. The account has since been made protected, as seen above.
Moreover, the police department didn’t seem even the slightest bit apologetic for their goof up. They insisted that these tweets were “auto-generated” by their Twitter handle @BCPCR.Â
This alludes to two possibilities: Either we’ve got a sentient Twitter handle on our hands which “auto-generates” tweets on a whim or a real human being fucked up. I’m banking on the second one.
Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society had this to say about the massive goof up.
“(The) police officer who ordered to create such an account should be held responsible if any harm comes to a complainant.”
While finding the person responsible is a must, it doesn’t really fix the real problem, does it? Securing our private information is the need of the hour. With millions of us readily giving away our personal details out to private corporations or our own government, we trust them to keep this information safe. Something like “auto-generated” tweets can never be a valid excuse for the leaking of sensitive information.
News Source: India TodayÂ