India now has its own Ashley Madison episode. No, not a dating website, we are talking about Ola Cabs. The app-based taxi service has been accidentally and repeatedly leaking out names, numbers and others details of its client database in Bangalore to a customer in Chennai. And we are not yet sure if they have rectified the situation despite the user repeatedly informing them about it.
Chennai-based freelance content writer, Swapnil Midha has come close to throwing her phone away, thanks to repeated messages from Ola cabs.
About three weeks ago, Midha used Ola for a long distance drive, and since then, she has been receiving constant text messages from Ola – 300 to 400 text messages – containing names, addresses and phone numbers of Ola users in Bengaluru. Ola basically handed out private data of hundreds of its customers to Midha.
“Ola was sharing with me the personal details of their customers throughout the day and throughout the night,” she wrote a Facebook post. “It’s lucky I’m not a psychopath roaming the streets of Bangalore, waiting to get my hands on people’s personal information and knowing when they are home and when they are not, isn’t it!”
If this in itself was not freaky enough, Ola compounded the error by taking their own sweet time in rectifying it. Despite Midha’s repeated efforts in bringing it to their notice, the issue was not corrected.
“I wrote them several emails, only to receive lousy generic responses which made it evident that they haven’t even tried to understand this problem. I sent them several screenshots and my emails got angrier by the day. It had NO effect whatsoever. I was losing sleep and peace of mind, with a steadily rising desire to flush my phone down the toilet.”
When that didn’t work, Midha tried to reach them through social media. “I tweeted them, I wrote to them on Facebook, I sent more emails, I tried to reason with more people at their call centre,” she wrote. “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.”
Today Midha is privy to personal details of many people in Bangalore, including where they live. And despite her outrage for all the sleep she lost over it and the apathy of the staff, her primary fear is whether her details too have been compromised.
“If they are sending all this to me, who are they sending MY booking details to? Whose number is receiving all of my data? Which creepy criminal knows my full name, my mobile number, my door number, my account details, when I’m home and when I’m out?” she asked.
As another last resort, Midha has posted this episode on Facebook along with names and last four digits of their mobile number as well snapshots of the texts.
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.”
Take a look at Midha’s post to see if your number features anywhere on this list.
Ola Cabs Leaked Over 100 Customers’ Personal Data To Me and They Don’t CarePlease share if you live in Bangalore! In…
Posted by Swapnil Midha on Saturday, August 29, 2015
Image Courtesy: BCCL
More on>> Balancing Act
