Ola Leaked Its Customers Data, claims User; Company Blames Manual Error

Ola Cabs has landed itself in controversy again. After Delhi govt rejects its license application, a Chennai based user claims that the online cab aggregator has been leaking its customer’s personal details like mobile numbers and locations through SMS.

Named Swapnil Midha, the user confirms through a facebook post that the cab provider has sent personal information of about 100 customers to her through a text message. She has been receiving ‘alpha-numeric messages with hashes’ by VM-OLACAB since the day she booked an Ola cab. Till now, she has received almost 400 text messages from Ola.

She writes, “My phone beeped throughout the night. 1:06, 2:34, 2:37, 2:38, 4:05, 5:17. I couldn’t get my head around why these were coming at these times. I then called their call centre the next day to explain that there was probably some sort of bug and my number had somehow gotten into their highly cryptic message transmission systems, whatever secrets they were trying to transmit. They assured me they would stop them right away.”

Earlier, Ola had said, “The alleged hack seems to have been performed on a staging environment when exposed for one of our test runs. The staging environment is on a completely different network compared to our production environment, and only has dummy user values exclusively used for internal testing purposes.”

While Ola claims to be the ‘easiest way to book a cab’, this report has raised questions about the way it is handling the personal data of its customers.