India privacy scandal brews over claim PM Narendra Modi’s app ships personal data abroad
Row erupts after a French security researcher flagged flaws with Modi’s personal app
Allegations that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official smartphone app is shipping Indians’ personal data to servers abroad have morphed into a political scandal in a country where privacy rules are weak and the data mining runs rampant.
Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi taunted the prime minister after a pseudonymous researcher found that Modi’s app was pumping private information such as citizens’ email addresses to servers controlled by a US firm.
“Hi! My name is Narendra Modi. I am India’s Prime Minister,” Gandhi wrote in a sarcastic Twitter post published Sunday.
“When you sign up for my official App, I give all your data to my friends in American companies.”
But the Congress president did not comment on allegations that his own party had taken down a membership website and mobile app because of security flaws and allegations that it too was sharing people’s personal data.