Bengaluru police publish more than 40,000 phone numbers on Twitter in privacy breach

Bengaluru police have published the phone numbers  of thousands of citizens who had reported various crimes such as gambling on the streets, random quarrels and harassment of women, on Twitter, The Economic Times reported.

The police control room had put out over 46,000 tweets since April 2015 containing the numbers of complainants calling the emergency number 100.

The phone numbers of citizens who reached the control room through Bengaluru police's new emergency mobile application, Suraksha, too, had been published under the twitter handle.

The Twitter handle, @BCPCR, however, had a mere 66 followers as on the evening of 5 April, nearly 30 per cent of which were various police stations in the city. Last evening, the police closed the account for public view.

ET claims to have screenshots of tweets from the account.

A senior police officer at Bengaluru police's Command Control maintained that the tweets were meant to 'show' the number of calls received by the control room and the number of people using the new app.

On the matter of compromising the safety of the complainants, the officer said, that it was obvious that the accused would know who registered the complaint and privacy did not matter.

Not surprisingly, this has raised the hackles of privacy and law experts

''This is horrible and unpardonable,'' said Supreme Court advocate KV Dhananjay, ET Tech reported. ''The fact that the police did not consider it necessary to ask for permission before broadcasting someone's identity shows how insensitive the Police Commissioner's office has become to the privacy concern of our society.''