Bengaluru police bungle, post 40,000 phone numbers on Twitter

The Bengaluru police ended up breaching the privacy of citizens who reached out to them on their emergency contact number, 100. More than 40,000 phone numbers were made public by the Bengaluru City Police Control Room's twitter handle. The account has now been converted into a protected account.

A report suggested that phone numbers of thousands of citizens who had been reporting various crimes such as gambling on the streets, random quarrels and harassment of women via emergency number '100' as well as the newly introduced mobile application, 'Suraksha' were made public by accident. The twitter account has been making phone numbers public since April 2015 without realising the violation of privacy being committed.

The account is followed by other accounts controlled by specific police stations staff across the city. and is currently closed from public viewing. The report also claimed that a senior police officer at Bengaluru police's Command Control was unapologetic about the breach of privacy and said that the tweets were generated automatically and meant to 'show' the number of calls received by the control room and the number of people using the new app.

OneIndia News