Net Neutrality: After making 1mn ids public, TRAI tries to hide mistake; fails

In a damage control move, TRAI altered email IDs of all stakeholders who had responded to its consultation paper on framework for over-the-top players like Viber, WhatsApp and net neutrality.

TRAI, net neutrality, Net Neutrality debate,

At the same time, TRAI has also recognised positive impact of OTT applications in terms of a boost they can provide to the business output and employee efficiency.

In a damage control move, the telecom regulator TRAI altered email IDs of all stakeholders who had responded to its consultation paper on framework for over-the-top players like Viber, WhatsApp and net neutrality.

After facing flak for making public 10 lakh email IDs on its website, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) today resorted to ‘munging’ of all addresses to check spammers from automatically copying these IDs. In address munging, the email IDs are changed by replacing symbols like @ to (at) and a ‘.’ to (dot).

Of course what TRAI hasn’t taken into account is that someone could still write a script and get the required email IDs.

As we had noted earlier, the disregard of user privacy means that TRAI has easily handed spammers so many email ids. TRAI could have added a few asterisks after the first few letters to the email IDs instead of just converting @ into at.

The fuss over email IDs matters because email is linked to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn in the case of many users, and by exposing them all, TRAI has possibly put many social media accounts at risk, even if inadvertently.

The website of TRAI remained inaccessible for several hours for two days after it released all comments on its websites on Monday. Anonymous had later claimed that it has brought down website of TRAI through a cyber attack known as Distributed Denial of Service in which huge amount of internet traffic is directed towards a website that disables its access.

TRAI official, however, has said that the website was down following a technical error in system provided by National Informatics Centre.

With PTI inputs