How will we deal with potential misuse of personal information

[MansoorMajeed]

Subject of the issue

The site is filled with personal information including address, phone number etc. We need to seriously think about how we will prevent the misuse of these information. Right now it is accessible to anyone.

We can only hope that no one will misuse this, but that won't be the reality

[p5yph3r]

I think the data set should be compressed to a password protected zip file. If anyone wants to use the data set, he should first submit his details and then admins can give him the dataset, so that all those having the dataset can be tracked.

[rasinansar]

Wouldn't that slow down the rescue operations?

[MansoorMajeed]

@rasinansar We need to think it through. How to handle it without slowing down the rescue operation

[p5yph3r]

elif we could make a form, of details of whoever wants to access data with email/sms-verification, and once verified , we could send them the password.

[yeaske]

First and foremost, the data is already out there, so only action that can be taken now is to minimize the impact and ward of any future legal liabilities. You might already be doing most of them, but just for posterity:

Few standard recommendations:

• Stop giving out real data as bulk extracts for testing. There are other ways to generate test data.
• Restrict the PROD DB read access to a limited user group.
• Don't implement any feature that allows bulk download of data as api/json/xml/csv/excel.
• A legal declaimer displayed at the bottom of the data collection screen and/or a mandatory modal OK click waiving the right to privacy of the provided data.
• Collect info about anyone who had access to data (logs/audits?) for future legal liabilities. (highly unlikely in our country)
• Person search page or its result page should display header/footer warning legal action against misuse of data.

Any other actions that can be taken are intrusive and will affect the easy accessibility of data for rescue efforts.

One edit/addition: Purge the whole data once the rescue effort is completed. No backups.