This is the second time our data has been pilfered
Yesterday we learned that a company that the Department of Foreign Affairs outsourced the production of passports to managed to run off with data that they acquired in the years that they’ve been doing their job.
This is a big deal. Not just because of how it affects the passport application process (you’ll now have to bring birth certificates when renewing green, maroon and brown-machine readable passports) but how the government is treating the issue.
It angers me to no end how the loss of data was announced to the public by the DFA. It wasn’t a press conference when we learned about the missing data – no, we found out about it because Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. told someone about it in the course of a normal Twitter conversation.
Everybody agrees with me that old passport is 1000% ID better than birth certificate: the holder applied for it and not someone else for a baby. But we are rebuilding our files from scratch because previous outsourced passport maker took all the data when contract terminated. https://t.co/cPjC3w7kAt
— Teddy Locsin Jr. (@teddyboylocsin) January 8, 2019
That shows you just how much the government cares about safeguarding your personal data. The matter-of-fact revelation of Mr. Locsin is worrying because it’s like the government doesn’t realize the implication of what transpired. Hell, we don’t even know how many Filipinos are affected by this particular data loss, which I have to reiterate, was only revealed THROUGH THE COURSE OF A NORMAL TWITTER CONVERSATION.
EDIT: Previous DFA Foreign Affairs Secretary Peter Alan Cayetano did mention a year ago that the data was lost and corrupted, but nowhere did he say that the passport maker ran off with the data, as with what Mr. Locsin revealed on Twitter.
This isn’t the first time that the government has managed to lose a large swath of the population’s personal data. The COMELEC data breach that happened back in 2016 was pegged as the world’s biggest data breach when it happened, exposing around 55 million Filipinos because the government didn’t implement even the most basic of security protocols, leaving voter information like names, addresses, passport numbers and others in plain text format.
And now we have this. Since the DFA didn’t even have the courtesy of telling us how many people are affected, it’s safe to say that anyone that hasn’t managed to upgrade to the latest passport has their data stolen by the wayward contractor. And why in the actual hell did a foreign contractor have the only access to our data anyway? Shouldn’t that job be given to a local outfit so stuff like this doesn’t happen?
At the very least, we need full accountability of what happened to Filipino’s data. How many people affected, what kind of data is in the hands of what essentially are foreign citizens, and what is being done about it. We deserve that, as a people at the very bare minimum.
EDIT:
One of our readers pointed out that then Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano told reporters during a press conference in DFA ASEANA that everyone renewing since 2016 had to get new biometrics because the previous data was lost or corrupted.
https://www.facebook.com/mindanaodailymirror/posts/375966449846401?hc_location=ufi
He also said that “We made sure din that the data is safe and private at may redundancy.”
