A girl from Chennai claims that OlaCabs, known as Ola, a mobile app for personal transportation in India, has sent personal information of more than 100 of its customers to her via SMS.
Swapnil Midha posted on Facebook that Ola, which started as an online taxi-hailing app in Mumbai, and is now based in Bangalore and is among the fastest-growing businesses in India, leaked personal data such as mobile phone numbers and locations of users. However, the company considers it a technical error and confirmed that it has now been fixed.
“About three weeks ago, I had booked a cab from Ola for a long journey. After my transfer, I received some garbled texts from “VM-OLACAB” which I didn’t pay much attention to and ignored. These messages were alphanumeric with hashes and didn’t make any sense to me. I assumed there was some error in the system and went to sleep,” he wrote on Facebook.
He added: “My phone was ringing all night. 1:06, 2:34, 2:37, 2:38, 4:05, 5:17. I couldn’t calm down from the messages coming in at those hours. Then I called their call center the next day to explain that there was probably some kind of bug and my number had somehow gotten caught up in their messaging systems, whatever messages they were trying to transmit.”
Despite Ola assuring her that it had fixed the problem, she continued to receive one SMS after another. She received around 300 to 400.
“I received no further communication from them, no updates, no emails, just more confusing messages,” he explained. I contacted them through every available channel possible. I called their call center at least 5 times, asked to speak to senior management, and had to explain my problem each time in great detail, answering the same annoying questions.”
She said that the company is sharing the personal details of their customers all day and all night.
The girl raised a serious issue which the company should address as soon as possible. If one of the most trusted companies like Ola is behaving and is so reckless, what can we expect from others?
