Centre for Internet & Society

Even the Narendra Modi app of PM Modi is susceptible to data theft as a 22-year old Indian hacker established, claiming that privacy of more than 70 lakh users on it is at stake.

This was published by Free Press Journal on March 25, 2018


Still worse is that anybody downloading the app may not know that all data on his mobile automatically goes to CleverTap without his or her consent to let the firm populate it alike British firm Cambridge Analytica that helped the US President Donald Trump in the last election with the vast data stolen from Facebook.

Congress social media chief Divya Spandana/ Ramya on Saturday retweeted a tweet by one Pranesh Prakash to know whether Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad talking of summoning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will also summon the PM for privacy violation and data theft.

Once you download the Narendra Modi app, all your data like your phone numbers, emails, name, location and interests as also all on your phone list, WhatsApp list and email is captured and then populated to know your interests and send you mails and messages accordingly, Divya explained.

Hacker Javed Khatri, who was able to crack the app late last year says he is able to access private data of any user and that is how he “successfully managed to extract the personal phone numbers and email ids of ministers like Smriti Irani.”

“Not only that, I can make any user on the platform follow any other user on the platform. This is just the summary of this huge security loophole which I want to report. The privacy of more than seven million users is at stake if this gets ignored.” Javed said, stressing that he did not want to cause any harm but wanted to demonstrate how poor the security of the app is that he could easily hack it.

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