Irancell finally released a public statement about the exposure of their user data. The statement is one of the most shameful statements that we have seen or heard from a company. Want to know what they had to say about the data leak?
Operators are having a tough competition in Iran to the point that users are getting crushed in between. After a few days from Irancell’s data leak by an employee of an organization (There is no data available about that person yet), Irancell finally released a public statement that made us really think about our privacy rights and obscenity of this mobile network operator. Irancell didn’t even apologize to its users for its data leak in the statement.
Irancell’s statement which was written after a few days of being silent, claims that the user data leak wasn’t their fault, so apparently they didn’t see the need for an apology for it. Irancell didn’t mention the fact that why they needed to hand over the user data to the government, and with what court order they did it. The operator literally claimed that they didn’t hand over the user’s data to anyone, so they don’t even acknowledge that their data was leaked and if some other entity or a person leaked the data it’s not the operator’s problem. Basically, nobody is taking the blame and nobody is apologizing for the data leak.
Irancell even took it to another level and accused other operators of violating the user privacy by providing their users’ information to advertising agencies for commercial use. Of course, Irancell wasn’t the one which started to throw punches. Few days after the incident, MCI, Iran’s first and the biggest operator, sent a message to all of its users that the data which got leaked is not about them, and MCI’s users should feel safe. In this way MCI let the whole country know about the Irancell data leak, which wasn’t nice coming from a big operator such as MCI. But again it’s a mess that everyone is pointing fingers at and nobody is apologizing to the people.
One other interesting fact is that the 19 year old boy who was behind the Telegram bot that made the leaked data viral on this messaging app, said that he removed the bot and the data five days ago. As we mentioned in our previous post, Mahmoud Vaezi the Minister Communication stated that they have asked Telegram to remove the bot. It’s not yet clear who removed the bot at the end, the Ministry or the teenager behind it.
What we are wondering about is that nobody is talking about the actual person who leaked the data. At the end, this person was behind the data leak and he should be arrested for it. And the last and most important unanswered question is that what is Irancell or the government doing to protect user’s data. If a 19 years old teenager can have access to this data, this information must be out there in many people’s hands.
The story is not finished yet. We should wait and see what the government or the cyber police would do to get back the Irancell user data.
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