Kunal Anand reports that a woman received hundreds of text messages with customer info and couldn’t get Ola Cabs to stop or to care:
It turned out, Ola was sending me confirmation messages when other customers made a booking, in BANGALORE!…Hidden within the hashes I found mobile numbers, names and addresses….Ola was sharing with me, personal details of their customers throughout the day and throughout the night.”
Okay, that’s not good, but Ola’s response – or lack thereof – to her notification is troubling:
Ola went on to ignore the problem, despite emails, messages on Twitter, Facebook, and hours spent calling and explaining the issue to their customer care team. ” I tweeted them, I wrote to them on Facebook, I sent more emails, I tried to reason with more people at their call centre. In the end, I began calling the customers themselves to tell them I was receiving their booking and all of their private details. They were all shocked and promised to complain to Ola. I will never know if they really did.”
Read more on India Times. As if this isn’t bad enough, it appears that this isn’t the cab company’s first breach this year. Anand also reports:
This is the second time this year that Ola Cabs security has been compromised. Hacker group Teamunknown, in a Reddit post, has claimed that it hacked the Ola servers and gained access to customer data including sensitive credit card information.
There was some discussion as to whether that was a just a test environment, but concerns about the company’s data security have been raised before. So would you trust this cab company with your details and payment card information? After reading all this, I’d be hesitant to.
Update 1: Today, iDiva posted something about this story with an update:
She later posted an update: “Three weeks, multiple emails, tweets, Facebook posts and finally media coverage later, Ola has emailed me on 30th August and responded on Twitter, to let me know they have fixed the issue. Hopefully I will not receive any more texts from them.”
And then there was this episode yesterday: “So it’s midnight in Chennai and Ola continues to happily send me more of your private data, Bangalore. I have updated the text with 6 more customers’ details.”