Did Ola Cabs Reveal Customers Private Data To Chennai Girl ??

An Ola Cabs customer, Swapnil Midha from Chennai was surprised when she started receiving SMS from Ola cabs. She described the text in the SMS as “alpha-numeric with hashes and made no sense…

She was unable to understand what exactly is the text containing and the reason why she is receiving the text messages when she haven’t made any booking. She posted a note on the social networking media Facebook alleging that the Ola has been sending her SMS alerts, which contains the confidential information of the other customers, such as their name, address, phone number and other information.

Is Ola Cabs Revealed Customers Private Data To Chennai Girl ??

 

The Facebook post by Swapnil Midha says “My phone beeped throughout the night. 1:06, 2:34, 2:37, 2:38, 4:05, 5:17. I couldn’t get my head around why these were coming at these times.” When she rang up the call center, as a concerned consumer, they gave a perfunctory ‘We’ll look into it’ sort of message. She didn’t receive any other follow up. “no further communication from them, no update, no email, just more garbled messages.”

The grabbled message didn’t stop and she wrote on Facebook post that she had been receiving around 300-400 texts.

Is Ola Cabs Revealed Customers Private Data To Chennai Girl ??

The post states that she has been receiving hundreds of SMSes from Ola over day and nights since several days. She called the Ola customer service number to complain and to know the reason behind sending the hundreds of SMS that contains the customers information. When she called the Ola customer service the employees were clueless about this and the Ola senior management refused to speak to her. Ola management has no idea what she was talking about and they were clueless then she began looking into what those messages could contain.

It turned out, Ola was sending me confirmation messages when other customers made a booking, in BANGALORE!…Hidden within the hashes I found mobile numbers, names and addresses….Ola was sharing with me, personal details of their customers throughout the day and throughout the night.

“It’s lucky I’m not a psychopath roaming the streets of Bangalore, waiting to get my hands on people’s personal information and knowing when they are home and when they are not, isn’t it!” says Swapnil Midha.

Ola went on to ignore the problem, despite emails, messages on Twitter, Facebook, and hours spent calling and explaining the issue to their customer care team. ” I tweeted them, I wrote to them on Facebook, I sent more emails, I tried to reason with more people at their call center. In the end, I began calling the customers themselves to tell them I was receiving their booking and all of their private details. They were all shocked and promised to complain to Ola. I will never know if they really did”, told Swapnil Midha.

Nothing seemed to work which makes you think – do they even care about protecting customer information? If they are sending all this to me, who are they sending MY booking details to? Whose number is receiving all of my data? Which creepy criminal knows my full name, my mobile number, my door number, my account details, when I’m home and when I’m out?”

Ola In Response To The Facebook Post Of The Customer

“We have been trying to establish contact with the customer who reported this and have not been able to do so. There has been a manual error on the entry of a driver’s device number on our system, which is deeply regretted. We have fixed this instance by deleting the number from our database and are putting in place a verification procedure as well to avoid such instances in the future. We value the privacy of our users and will continue to take utmost care in terms of data security on the Ola platform.”

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