Seldom have I seen a greater flood of righteous indignation than in the wake of the EasyInfo scandal. The online publication of unlisted subscribers` names, telephone numbers and residential addresses last week sparked heated debate from all quarters, with indignant telephone subscribers baying for blood - preferably that of Alan Lipschitz.
Conspiracy theorists have pointed fingers at everyone from the major banks, to medical aid schemes, to the corner pharmacy, for selling their contact details.
Tracy Burrows, journalist, ITWeb
Lipschitz, who staunchly defends his online directory as a marvel of technology, has rapidly become the bad guy in the piece. A bit of timely PR could have saved a great deal of face, but he now has hackers targeting him and sending his personal information to the media (including ITWeb). And it hasn`t gone unnoticed that while he maintains that there is no harm in having one`s personal information freely available online, his own address and home phone number are nowhere to be seen on the EasyPeople directory.
While Lipschitz might well deserve virtual lynching for the poor handling of the scandal, the real issue is: where did the data come from anyway? Half of my correspondents maintain it has to be Telkom, because the EasyPeople directory reflects exactly the same spelling errors that Telkom`s does. Others say their details on the Telkom directory and the EasyPeople directory differ markedly.
Pointing fingers
Conspiracy theorists have pointed fingers at everyone from the major banks, to medical aid schemes, to the corner pharmacy, for selling their contact details. And this is probably why the EasyInfo directory has unleashed such outrage - no one knows whom to trust anymore.
Someone out there - someone we trust - has profited by exposing us all to the irritation of telemarketers, and the risks of being robbed, stalked, or attacked in our homes by insane ex-spouses.
Personally, I don`t believe Telkom would be so short-sighted as to sell directory content to an online directory in direct competition with its own TDS white pages listings. Nor would a canny hacker sell valuable content to a buyer who would then make it freely available, when it could make far more money if it was sold over and over to assorted marketers. So who then? A back-office clerk with Telkom`s passwords and an eye on a quick buck?
No one is telling. The mysterious Personal Pages and Umfowize Publishers aligned to EasyInfo are untraceable, unlisted entities. Telkom swears it wasn`t them. So do the banks and anyone else who gets half a chance for a bit of proactive self-defence. Until Lipschitz decides to come clean on where he got the data, or Telkom`s internal investigation turns up something useful, we will probably never know.
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