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Spam on you: TRAI's stupid. (So are you)

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Javed Anwer
Javed AnwerApr 28, 2015 | 18:25

Spam on you: TRAI's stupid. (So are you)

If you haven't noticed yet, the infamous Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, TRAI, is under fire today. Reason? It has put all those millions of emails it received from people as part of consultation on net neutrality on its website. Nothing wrong with that, actually. The problem is that all these emails have been put up in public domain in their entirety, complete with the private email addresses and all sorts of semi-private information that people have in their email signatures.

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Needless to say, this is one of the worst privacy breaches on Indian web users, or for that matters web users across the world, have faced.

Yes, it is that bad!

Who is at fault? Clearly it is TRAI's fault. But let's also cut it some slack.

As per the policy, TRAI is not exactly is not exactly wrong. The consultation was public and as a government body, TRAI is fairly transparent, at least when it comes to consultation matters. It puts out the comments it receives as part of the consultation in public domain as a policy. The problem is that this time, instead of getting a few hundred comments, it got more than a million emails.

So even though it was public, it would have been prudent - or rather common sense - for TRAI to avoid a gaffe like this. It is clear that when you make millions of emails and the IDs from which these emails were sent public, it constitutes a serious privacy breach. It is particularly damaging because once something is out in public on the web, the info is scrapped and saved for posterity.

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Even if TRAI removes this information, it will not do any good now because any scammer or spammer worth his or her salt must have already copied the data in several places.

Ideally, TRAI should have removed the private data - email IDs, signatures etc - from the emails before putting them up on the site. A case can be made that they should have also removed the names but then it was a public consultation and it is fair if the responses carry the names of the people.

While there are murmurs that TRAI is punishing people for supporting net neutrality by making their email IDs public, I don't believe it. It is just a matter of common sense failure. The people who uploaded their emails on the TRAI website just didn't realise what they were doing or what could be the implications. It is just old fashioned stupidity, apathy and ignorance - all rolled into one.

And that brings me to another point: India needs a privacy and data protection law. In our country, we are extremely callous about private data. The courier people, who are totally unaccountable, here often scan PAN cards and passports, before giving people their packages. We don't know how this data is used or stored by these courier firms. Government bodies are often callous about collecting and storing data. People are asked for data and information that is unnecessary and then once it has been provided, we have no idea how the government stores and uses it.

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There is just no thought applied to privacy while collecting or sharing data. And that has to change. Or else incidents like today's will keep on happening because people, including government officials dealing with private data, don't understand the implications of privacy breach.

Last updated: April 28, 2015 | 18:25
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