Outrage over Trai doxx

Congress seeks probe into Telecom regulator’s action

Did you write to TRAI on net neutrality? Your name, e-mail-ID is now public

Hyderabad: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has dumped more than a million netizens' traceable personal details online, after it decided to publish, in full, the emails it received as part of its consultation paper about net neutrality. Outraged netizens took to social networks on Tuesday criticising the Telecom regulator for making the names public. It is more than clearing of junk mail from your mail box.

At a time when the Prime Minister's Digital India concept is catching up, Trai has perhaps decided to make Internet more complex and troublesome. The Telecom regulator on March 27 had floated a consultation paper on putting in place a regulatory framework for over-the-top (OTT) services and April 24 was the last date to submit comments.

As the number of comments was huge, TRAI has divided the comments under three categories - comments from service providers, comments from service providers associations and comments from other stakeholders. However, among those published comments are more than 1.1m emails from netizens, presented alongside the email addresses and names of those commenting.

The dump potentially hands e-crims some very juicy details with which to phish and spam an enormous number of accounts with some certainty regarding the personal interests and location data of those targeted. Reacting to the episode, the former additional advocate general A Satya Prasad has felt that even the statutory authority (here Trai) has no right to release the individual opinions in public. "They can release only a collective opinion for the benefit of the policy makers.

The authority has grossly violated the right to privacy, which is guaranteed under the Constitution," he pointed out. An activist and general secretary of Free Software Movement, Y Kiran Chandra says, “These days of digitization, our e-mails are linked to various personal and financial matters like Aadhaar card, bank account etc, and we never know where our sensitive information lands and how it is being used (miss used).”

He felt that all these acts of Trai are due to pressure from the cellular operators lobby which is very strong. “We want Trai to ensure the net neutrality,” he pointed out. In fact, this would expose the net activists even to hackers, says another activist. Interestingly, India has no privacy laws, although the Constitution guarantees it, says a legal expert.

Interestingly, the Trai’s decision has turned as a boon for the e-marketers, who might have already scanned the pdf formats published, and every address which was listed may expect bargain proposal, Chandra pointed out. Now, the issue entered political quarters as the Congress raised the issue in the Lok Sabha during zero hour. Gaurav Gogoi claimed: "Trai putting up the list of names and e-mail addresses of net activists on its website is like a bank making the customers’ account details public."

He asked the government to probe as to why and who in the Trai had leaked the names."Congrats TRAI on releasing the mail ids of everyone who mailed you about net neutrality. Now we know how well you protect internet users,"Vir Sanghvi said on Twitter."So if you wrote to TRAI to #SaveTheInternet, you are now at the mercy of every spammer in the country? Bizarre. #NetNeutrality," Vikram Chandra said.

Another person on Twitter said: "Hi TRAI, it is NOT okay for a govt. regulator to expose 1M+ email IDs of respondents to your "OTT" paper! Do please note, Shri @rsprasad." Rajeev Chandrasekhar said "@PranavDixit reports on @httweets tht TRAI hs publishd email ids of all respondents on its website http://bit.ly/1JJVzye #NetNeutrality."

By:KVVV Charya