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The Indian Government wants to list your contact details online

SMS's have gone out from Airtel to some subscribers, informing them that "As per instruction from DOT, airtel needs to publish telephone directory of its subcribers on its website. If you don't want your details to be listed, please SMS NORQMT to 53636 (Rs 3/SMS)". Sourced at Airtel told MediaNama that a notification has been received from the Department of Telecommunications for publishing online, a directory of fixed line numbers. Some of the other telecom operators already have a directory listing up, online. Hi @nixxin is this true? Thanks pic.twitter.com/CV5OwLwTPq — Sethuraman (@chandsethu) September 9, 2014 Initially, we had been suspicious of the authenticity of this message because of two reasons: it asked for the response to be sent to 53636, and not 121. Remember that 53636 was a short code earlier owned by Activemedia/2ergo. Secondly, because the opting out would cost the sender Rs 3. It now seems that the message was legit, and frankly, it's rather ridiculous of Airtel to charge customers for opting out of this, when they shouldn't have been opted in in the first place. Also read: Marketing firm scrapes voter data from EC website to let political parties micro-target Reliance Communications already has a listing up If you want to know what this example of a privacy violation looks like, head over to the Reliance Communications website, where you can enter any string, and be shown names, numbers and physical addresses for individuals. It allows searching for individuals on the basis of telephone numbers, Name, Address, City and…

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Written By

Founder @ MediaNama. TED Fellow. Asia21 Fellow @ Asia Society. Co-founder SaveTheInternet.in and Internet Freedom Foundation. Advisory board @ CyberBRICS

MediaNama’s mission is to help build a digital ecosystem which is open, fair, global and competitive.

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