For Sale: Your Personal Data!

Bangalore: Are you registered with the Do Not Call registry and still get unwanted calls and SMSes? Well blame it on the dealers who sell the personal data of people on payment of a said amount. You can actually buy a database that includes the address, email ID and phone number of professionals for a paltry sum, reports Sameer Ranjan Bakshi of Bangalore Mirror.

Despite strict guidelines from the Reserve Bank of India and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, small time vendors are doing brisk business by selling off such data. A 'database' that includes two crore email IDs and 10 lakh phone numbers of IT professionals is sold for as low as Rs 2,500.

The online business vendors are flourishing by selling email and telephone numbers of High Net worth Individuals (HNI), the salaried class, IT professionals, students, and credit card holders among others.

They technically sell only bulk SMS software, which enables you to send as many as 10,000 SMSes in an hour. Actually, the software is free: they instead charge you for the SMSes which they send through the internet and not through mobile service providers.

The unfortunate part of the whole story is that the authorities cannot do anything in this regard as there is no jurisdiction if the vendors get their database from banks and individual customers. Only when telecom operators are involved in selling personal info can there be some action taken by their end.

And also these dealers are not registered with the Department of Telecom, which is mandatory for every telemarketer. This leads to more annoyance as these calls and SMSes cannot be countered in anyway.