Are E-Commerce Websites, Banks, Hawking Your Personal Details For Their Gain?

The newspaper correspondents say they posed as clients and data of a lakh people was available for anywhere between Rs 10,000 and Rs 15,000 in cities like Bengaluru, Delhi and Hyderabad.

Outlook Web Bureau

Updated on: 28 February 2017 1:54 pm

The personal details you reveal on e-commerce websites or online banking portals are being leaked for as less as a rupee. An investigation by The Economic Times reveals that companies who act as ‘data brokers’ were willing to sell details of people who have furnished them online for transactions.

The report says that details like your residential address, email, phone number, marital status, how much you earn, and what you have brought online, are all on this market. The newspaper correspondents say they posed as clients and data of a lakh people was available for anywhere between Rs 10,000 and Rs 15,000 in cities like Bengaluru, Delhi and Hyderabad.

The report mentions that the information on sale was also categorized according to income or net worth, or slotting the person according to if they had a credit card or not. Other categories included salaried people , car owners and retired people.

The newspaper got in touch with people whose details had been handed out to them only to discover that they were real and not happy about it. “It’s scary to say the least,” Rajashekar from Hyderabad told the newspaper. His details were given to the newspaper by a broker from Gurgaon who provided information on 3000 people with Axis and HDFC Bank cards for the princely sum of Rs 1000.

eBay and Amazon both denied that the leaks happened at their end while an Axis Bank spokesperson told ET that they couldn’t confirm the “authenticity of the data” but were educating customers to not give out their details recklessly.

Owning data in this fashion is not a crime but it does work in a grey area. How does the data get to the ‘data brokers’?

One of them told the newspaper that “mobile service providers, agents from hospitals and banks, loan agents and car-dealers” were hot-spots for data collection.

Having access to this data could result in cyber-crimes of the financial nature. Till December 2016, the RBI had registered 8,689 cases involving frauds of credit/debit cards and internet banking. The number for 2015-16 stood at 16,468.