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62% users upload personal info on FB: Cyber experts

PAN, Aadhaar, voter ID cards details on FB making users vulnerable

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A team of five cyber experts, who recently conducted an experiment where they went through 8000 random profiles on Facebook and found out patterns, said a majority of the users are not cautious while sharing private information publicly.

The experts said that the information they upload is not just about their social life, but also includes significant documents such as details about PAN, Adhaar and voter identification cards.

As per data collected by scanning the general profiles on Facebook, the experts found that only 25 percent of the users have actual friends on their friends' list. Others are mostly acquaintances or 'online friends', the survey concluded.

"Some people have also uploaded selfies with their newly-made Aadhaar and PAN cards. This is a dangerous practice. The people who are putting out this information don't know that somebody else might misutilise it," said Viral Parmar, who heads a private cyber security company.

Parmar along four other team members, who were professional hackers (and refused to be named) claimed that there were many cases where the PAN card number was copied and then used to duplicate the SIM cards of a user. "This is disastrous because the hacker can also get the OTPs generated for bank transactions," Parmar added.

Other experts also said that they repeatedly appeal to the public to not put out such information. "There have been multiple cases where people have shared information about private government documents such as PAN and Aadhaar cards, and have lead to cheating cases," Jasmine Rozia, cyber cell crime branch.

The experts also found that out of the 8,000 people who were included in the survey, there was only 20 percent fake profiles and 62 percent of the people had uploaded photos with personal data. There were only 18 people people who have also secured their account, the experts added. "There are so many possibilities of misusing the fake profiles on Facebook. The person with a fake profile can arrange to meet and then kidnap or rob or rape," Rozaliya said.

He also claimed that when one puts out every bit of information on the social media, there are people who might misutilise it and then stalk or harm them", Rozia said.

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