Mumbai police has uploaded a list of convicted drunk drivers in an excel sheet accessible to everyone on its website Trafficpolicemumbai.org. (Hat tip Twitter account) At the time of writing this article, the records database was still available for download. We checked the database and it contains 37,229 records of drunk drivers database with information such as date of offence, name, car number, type of vehicle, details of M.D.L, traffic L.A.C number, police station L.A.C number, and details of fine in court. Some of the records also contain the convict's residential address. Privacy issues The database record goes back to 2007 and contains private information like name, vehicle number and residential address and this record is available on their website for anyone to download. Since the database contain personal information and personally identifiable information in some cases, it raises a major privacy concern as this data could be easily misused. There are certain aspects of life that one does not want to disclose it to the world, sometimes because they are personal. The government or anyone that holds one's data cannot, or rather should not, share this data publicly. However, since India does not have any privacy law in place yet, one can easily get away from violating personal information. Another point to note here is that the information disclosed contains permanent records which cannot be easily changed if it's been disclosed in public. Private information such as password, email addresses can be changed easily without any financial implications, while changing private information…
