Albay 2nd district Rep. Joey Salceda thinks that "carelessness" on the part of the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) may have facilitated the annoying and worrisome spam text blasts of today.
According to Salceda, the IATF was “careless to require contact tracing under multiple apps and databases,” instead of just one application with a single protecting data controller.
Contact tracing was among the measures used by government to contain the spread of Covid-19 infections during the early days of the pandemic.
Salceda, chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, said the contact tracing databases by different establishments may have been the source for personal information by text spam being received by mobile phone users.
Some of the more recent spam messages even mention the names of the users, which gives everyone an idea of the level of the breach.
“The IATF did not push hard enough and enforce a single contact tracing app with a single database. That means you had different data collectors, some of whom may not have been able to protect data.
"I don’t want to ascribe malice, but some of them may have even sold it," the Bicolano said.
“All of these potential data breaches could have been limited by having just one single controller and clearinghouse of data that is also protected and audited," he underscored.
Aa such, the veteran solon asked the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to work with the telecommunications companies to detect and prevent “a mass of successive text messages in suspicious volumes".
“That way, we can prevent mass or spam messaging," he stressed.