TRAI Foolishly Released Over 1 Million E-Mail Ids

Link : http://trai.gov.in/Comments/Comments-List003.pdf

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has released the list of email IDs from which it received responses regarding net neutrality or the #SaveTheInternet campaign that rallied the country�s attention around the Net Neutrality issue.

The e-mails leaks happens that all of the emails sent to the TRAI are now publicly visible.

TRAI on March 27 had put up a consultation paper on its website asking users from India to give their views on net neutrality in India. The last day to vote for the campaign was April 24. The list is published on TRAI website and has emails categorized by date; the data is available for all dates between March 27 and April 24, except April 14 and 15. The document can also be searched via keywords.

Every person who has sent an email to TRAI has their email address listed onthis TRAI page, for example, which has a list of 10,801 emails from that campaign. That�s not all;, the TRAI has 16 such lists, and your mail to them might just be within one of those. Further, clicking through the links on this these pages leads to complete emails, many of which have addresses, phone numbers and other personal details in the signatures.

But the worst part of the story is that TRAI website has been attacked soon after #netneutrality email addresses revealed publicly by TRAI itself which means all the email-ids must be with the hackers by now.

Most of the responses sent to TRAI were via �Savetheinternet.in� � a site created by a few proponents of net neutrality in India. unwittingly or is it foolishly TRAI has exposed email address of all those who had submitted their responses and made them publicly available for spammers to scrape. But no one thought their emails would be public when they sent their responses in.

Thanks to TRAI, spammers and database sellers now have email ids of a cohort of 1 million Indians who (largely) support #NetNeutrality.