The Right2Know Campaign (R2K) has issued a statement saying it has still not received any response from the Office of the Information Regulator on its failure to respond to a complaint regarding the “biggest data breach in South African history”.The NGO, along with the Centre for Environmental Rights and the Public Service Accountability Monitor, sent an open letter to the Information Regulator on Friday, saying its complaints sent on October 19, 2017, had not been addressed.
“In October last year, security researcher Troy Hunt reported the breach of a database that has now been revealed to contain the sensitive personal information of more than 60 million people – living and dead,” said R2K spokesperson Busi Mtabane.
The database, which contains 60 323 827 rows of data with unique South Africa identity numbers, was accessed after the “Master Deeds” data breach last year.
The open letter also addressed the “use of personal information by people of political parties who send unsolicited and unwanted bulk messages to the population”, as well as the Office of the Information Regulator’s lack of visibility.
“People do not even know that the Information Regulator exists. Furthermore, that in the past year there has been a deafening silence from the Information Regulator regarding issues of national significance in relation to the abuse of personal information of people,” said Mtabane.
The Information Regulator was established in 2016 in terms of the Protection of Personal Information Act with the purpose of monitoring and ensuring compliance by private and public bodies.
