Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, September 8) — The National Privacy Commission (NPC) on Thursday said the proliferation of text scams with the subscriber’s name is unlikely from a data breach.
“We’re not ruling out the possibility of a leak or a breach (of data) but based on the evidence we’re seeing, it seems unlikely at this point in time,” said Commissioner Leandro Aguirre, during the Senate probe on the increasing number of text scams and spam messages.
He echoed Information and Communications Technology chief Ivan John Uy’s statement that the situation has worsened because of the pandemic.
“I think when everyone had to work-from-home, there was a shift also in the different technologies that people had to use and they were vulnerable. They didn’t have the necessary preparation in mind. Hindi nila naisip ‘yung security. [They didn’t think of security.] They had to make do with various solutions para magawa nila ‘yung [so they can do] work-from-home arrangements,” Aguirre explained.
Based on NPC’s initial investigation, the privacy commissioner said that data may have come from payment and messaging applications, noting that “manual harvesting” would not be efficient and would take time.
Meanwhile, mobile wallet GCash announced an application update that hides the full names of users in its send money service in a bid to further boost consumer data protection.
During the Senate hearing, GCash representative Mark Anthony Amurao said this is “for the purpose of allaying the fears of our citizens that their names will no longer be scraped or harvested.”
READ: GCash rolls out new anonymity feature, assures no data breach in system
