As part of its initiative to encourage LPG users to pay market price and not avail the LPG subsidy provided by the government, Bharatgas has put up a list of customers who have opted out on a 'Scroll of Honour' on its website. However, what Bharatgas hasn't paid much attention to is consumer privacy. One can simply select a State and a district and get a list of Bharatgas customers that opted out of the subsidy scheme, including their addresses. The consumer privacy implications of this is can be severe. Firstly, there's the chance of telemarketing companies, banks and credit card agents among others collecting your addresses and storing them on their database. But more worryingly, this information could be used for far worse activities. How difficult would it be to create a fake ID based on the address and name? The Modak Analytics case If you think these are extreme scenarios, then let me tell you that this has happened earlier. Last year, a Hyderabad-based web analytics company Modak Analytics claimed that it had created a “big data based Electoral data repository” after scraping information of 81.4 crore voters from Election Commission website. The company planned to analyze this data to help parties or candidates “raise funds, design a tailored communication to target a select few voters, rework advertisements and create detailed models for voter engagement in battleground states as well as in gender and voter clusters to increase the power of micro-targeted strategy,” the company had said in a statement to the Economic Times.…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...