Slashdot Mirror
Indian Call Centre Worker Sells Customer Details
lxt writes "A British tabloid newspaper managed to buy the personal details of over 1000 bank customers from an off-shore call centre based in Delhi. An IT worker at the call centre handed over details at £4.25 per customer, as well as credit card numbers and account passwords. He claimed could sell over 200,000 account details every month. The British police force has passed on details to Interpol and the Indian authorities, in an attempt to prosecute the individual. The BBC is also covering the story."
Well, it was to be expected, outsourcing the jobs to a low paid area - workers that are paid fairly are less likely to cheat their employees.
Get rid of the call centers, keep them in the country that they expect to be dealing with (UK call centers for UK clients etc)
Decades ago it was the waiter or waitress at the restaurant we used to worry about. When mail order began to grow, it was the person at the other end of the line of a mail-order company. Outsourcing (in country or out of country) is just a form of concentration of this phenomena.
Sending potentially valuable information to people in a high stress, low paying job (in country or out of country, my wife worked in a call center in college) with poor controls is a risk. We have known this since the beginning, but we just seem to relearn the lesson each time.
What do you know I wrote a novel
So the Sun offers an unspecified number of Indian Call Centre workers vast amounts of money to provide them with some confidential information and eventually one of them does.
The point of this story is what exactly, that everyone has their price ?
They are required by law to put provisions in place to make sure that customer data isn't revealed.
The act *is* flawed in that it allows data to be sent to countries without similar data protection if they have a contract in place, it shouldn't allow that in the first place. But the contract in place with the oursourcing organisation should make sure that they have sufficient safeguards in place to stop this, the fact that it's happening says that the outsourcing companies are in breach of contract and the banks haven't put sufficient safeguards in place, an offence against the data protection act, 1998.
We need some prosecutions against CIOs, CEOs and the like. A couple of years in prison would improve their attitude to data protection.
Deleted
No outsourcing = no crime. Is that what you're saying?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
The British police force has passed on details to Interpol and the Indian authorities, in an attempt to prosecute the individual.
They are barking up the wrong tree. If only the individual in another jurisdiction is liable to sanction, why is it allowed for British banks to move personal information to foreign countries in the first place? Shouldn't the bank be fined for failing to protect personal information of British citizens?
Abuse of power by employees is not something new or interesting, but the accountability issue is. Personal information should only be moved between countries with similar protections against abuse. Having said this, I don't know anything about British law on this issue.
Companies outsource jobs primarily because it is cheaper than providing the job themselves (this is especially true for jobs outsourced to other countries). We all know that. Part of the reason the jobs are cheaper to the company is because they do not have to worry about a host of expenses, including for example the cost of complying with governmental regulations related to the outsourced job.
I personally believe, however, that a company should still be required to enforce all regulations which protect the citizens of the source country (in this case, the UK). If it turns out the company is not able to force compliance with the governing regulation for whatever reason then it should be illegal to outsource that particular function. And if they are able to force compliance then the source company should be held liable for failure to comply by the outsourcing company with all of the associated penalties. The result would be that the source company could not avoid the cost of insuring regulations were followed and the outsourcing company would incur the cost of compliance as well.
This would have at least two effects. The cost of outsourcing would be more in line with competition in the source country and the citizens of the source country would not lose the protection afforded them by law.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
In terms of law, India is /far/ more advanced than many countries in the world.
- Separation between religion and state (expressed in the constitution as the nation being secular) actually works in India unlike many countries. India currently has a Sikh Prime Minister and a Muslim President. Whats more, our Muslim President has an advanced enough and open enough view of religion that he is a scholar and a practitioner of the often contradictory Hinduism and Islam.
- India is the worlds largest democracy. There's a billion people in India, and there's no country with a population even close to it thats a democracy in which the democratic process works as well as it does in India. And you honestly think that a working democracy would make laws to chop hands off citizens?
- Like mentioned in a previous post, India has joined other progressive (read non-US) countries in placing more value on human life - the death penalty exists, but is very rarely used. I think in the past several years, 1 person has been executed.
Please quit making completely unwarranted, unjustified, and most of all, uneducated comments. Your time is better spent actually looking up some information Wikipedia or elsewhere on the web every now and then. There's nothing healthier than doing that.
I'd say your morals are pretty suspect in this.
Actually, they're not suspect at all. They're as bad as the people you let get away with these crimes.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You've got to be kidding. Reporting a factual story is 'in poor taste'? This isn't the first time serious stories like this have come up. In the not so distant past....we had reports of a lady in India threatening to sell/release private medical information on US citizens if she wasn't paid some $$'s. And you seem to think that being nationalistic is something bad?? Why would anyone NOT want their country to come out on top? This life is a constant struggle, a perpetual contest to see who can win. Life IS competition, and frankly, I'd like to be on the winning side as often as possible. And while I don't advent keeping anyone down, I certainly am not altrusitic enough to want to give to others 'till it hurts'. I not only don't want others to succeed at our expense, but, I can't stand the fact that our country is actively hurting our citizens by thoughtlessly shipping our tech jobs overseas for a short term gain, but, losing sight of the long term detrimental effects....the main one being that if we don't have tech people working here, how will we continue to innovate? Already, we see the effects in that our young people are NOT working toward computer and other tech degrees as much as in the past.
"Which is not surprising, considering that offshoring/outsourcing is such a contentious topic right now. The average person, with zero knowledge about Economics, already believes the Indians and the Chinese are going to rob them of their jobs. Now those dirt poor foriegners are going to take their credit card numbers as well. The hypocrisy is, as you point out, this happens every day in Western parent companies. Which is fine, because everyone would rather be embezzled by their neighbor than someone they don't know."
to a point, you are right. Sure, there are criminal types all over the world. However, different cultures have different degrees of what they consider to be crimes. It does seem that India does not view privacy ideals, and minor theft of such as great of a crime as it is in the US by statute. Sure we have people that will do the same here in the US. However, we can catch them here and prosecute them. I doubt the same can be said of India. And lets face it...people in a country are going to be a bit more careful with treating their own people and their information than they will that of peoples of other countries. Someone that might be on the 'brink' of doing something wrong like this might think twice if it is a fellow countryman's info, rather than a foreigner's information.
And finally....you and others keep saying "In the long run, it will be better". Better for who? I cannot see how this benefits the US at all....shipping off jobs and creating unemployment for our citizens....giving no incentive for our young to go into tech fields..sure, we get some cheaper goods, but, in the end, if we have no decent paying jobs...who will be able to buy these cheap goods? Like I said, I have no problem with anyone in the world trying to improve their lot in life...but, not at my expense.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
See also Mithrandir86 's responses to other posts of the same ilk on the same subject.
By offshoring of jobs in the medical, insurance and banking fields, industries that will not expand based into the developing companies, except on a macro- or highest (read stockholder) level, we're effectively gutting the middle class's support of these industries.
If free trade is the argument, why do US (any parent country) companies routinely offer goods in these developing companies at a fraction of the cost to their US consumer counterparts in order to gain market share? How are these "loss leaders" paid for? By the US (any parent country) consumers.
By looking at the situation with rose-colored glasses and calling it free trade, you miss the underlying effects. The countries that are benefitting from the off-shoring don't reciprocate by exporting jobs, and overall don't usually utilize US (parent country) goods or services, instead the US (parent country) goods and services usually end up competing with government sponsored goods and services, which, by definition, must be below a competitive price point in order to be effectivly subsidized.
I agree that it is quite easy to move a "corporation" off-shore. But if a company has 15 executives and salesmen in the US and 1300 workers in another country, are they still a "US" company or should they be considered as such? Microsoft considers itself a US company, specifically a Washington state based company, but many of it's letters of incorporation are filed in Nevada, whereby they avoid over a $140 million in local Washington state taxes a year. They are "Redmond, Washington" in name only, and the land tax breaks that Washington gave them years ago in order to bring jobs to the area are being mitigated by Microsoft's increasing off-shoring of thier code work and slick legal wrangling. I can name several countries that will allow MS to relocate the corporation lock-stock-and letterhead to it's shores for a fraction of that. And based on US laws nothing precludes them from doing that, and still exploiting our market in such a monopolistic fashion....but it's free trade so that has to be good. Right?
Is mentioning Microsoft and monopoly in the same post the IT equivalent of Godwin's Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwin's_law?