Shashank Rao reports:
Your phone company knows where you live, your PAN, your employer and even your monthly salary. But wouldn’t you be shocked to find that the details that you provide so trustingly will find its way to a food stall vendor and, from him, to anyone who cares to stop for a bite?
Around three weeks ago, Dhiren Jhaveri, a resident of South Mumbai, had decided to stop for chaat at a bhelwala in Tardeo. He was shocked to find a bunch of Airtel customer relationship forms with the vendor, who was using it to pack his eatables. “I asked him the source of the bundle of papers. Initially, he refused to say anything but later he hesitantly told me that he bought them from a nearby raddiwala,” said Jhaveri.
[…]
Officials at Airtel claimed that everyday thousands of such forms are filled and that there is no loophole and that the forms must have ended up with the scrap dealer from the customers’ end who might have given a photocopy. An official statement from Airtel read, “We are committed to protecting our customer’s personal information and as a policy we adopt stringent security practices along with security control measures which comply with the government directions and guidelines. This is in order to protect our customer’s personal information from unauthorised access, or disclosure while it is under our control”.
In other words, they deny they are source of the problem.
Read more on Mid Day. In looking into this report and its background, I learned the price of old newspaper went up a lot recently, and street vendors who need paper to wrap their food or sales may be finding it more difficult and more costly to get paper.
So were the papers original Airtel bills or photocopies? Proof, people, we need proof! Yes, I realize this breach is not as sexy as those involving tens of thousands or millions, but paper records breaches are a significant minority of breaches.