If you have ever contacted the Bengaluru city police on their emergency contact number to report a crime, there are chances that your phone number could be among the tens of thousands that have been accidentally published on Twitter.
That sounds creepy. But the Bengaluru city police have posted more than 46,000 tweets since April 2015, containing phone numbers of people contacting them on the emergency number 100 to report various crimes like gambling on the streets, random quarrels and harassment of women, according to the Economic Times.
The tweets posted from the Twitter handle @BCPCR also included phone numbers of people who reached the control room through Bengaluru police's new emergency mobile application, Suraksha. The account, which is no longer accessible for public view, currently has only 66 followers, about 30 percent of whom are other police stations in the city.
Meanwhile, a senior police officer at Bengaluru police's Command Control denied any breach of privacy, arguing that there was no question of privacy because the accused would obviously know who reported the crime. The officer also told ET that the tweets were generated automatically, and intended to "show" how many people had contacted the control room and how many had used the Suraksha app.
It was not clear how the tweets were generated automatically. But what comes to mind based on the police officer's comment is the possibility of a Twitterbot, a bot program used to produce automated posts on the popular microblogging site.
Although the police officer was unapologetic for the breach of privacy, a Supreme Court lawyer told the publication that the incident is "horrible and unpardonable."
