A news has surfaced revealing a shocking fact about the JioMoney app. The app which the company was very vigorously promoting for payment services has been found to have a bug which exposes personal data of users including Aadhaar number, date of birth and even their JioMoney MPIN. Given the recent unrest in the country and general concern regarding data security and privacy, Reliance Jio seems to be in a tough spot.
However, after the revelation came to light Reliance Jio has made an official statement in this regard. The Mukesh Ambani led telco has said “We have come across an unverified and unsubstantiated claim of personal data of JioMoney users being exposed. We confirm that there is no such issue in JioMoney. Prima facie, the claims appear to be mischievous attempts to malign our services. We assure our users that their data is safe and maintained with highest security.”
The man behind this revelation is CS Akshay who was irked by Jio’s speed of issue resolution which he had complained about. After giving up hopes on the company, the guy decided to venture on his own and analysed JioMoney’s code which led to the finding of these severe loopholes in the application reports Medianama.
Previously, Akshay had set up a micro site on this topic and even sent Tweets about the issue. However, after the telco rang up and talked with Akshay, the Tweets and the microsite was taken down.
It is noteworthy, that this is not the first time that Reliance Jio has went through such an ordeal. In 2017 also a similar incident surfaced in which the users details were retrievable by anyone who took the simple effort. Last time, Imran Chhimpa, from Rajasthan was able to figure out a way to retrieve users’ data like their date of birth etc. just by using their Jio number. However, when the culprit set-up a website which enabled users to get information by entering Jio numbers, he was arrested.
Even after media caught the whiff of the issue in its entirety, the telco has denied al the claims regarding the issue. Reliance Jio’s stance on the issue remains mum as the telco says that the claims are just to ‘malign’ its services.
Another thing which should be kept in mind is that Reliance Jio is operating a payments system which is in many ways similar to Paytm and thus it comes under the regulations of RBI. It remains to be seen whether or not RBI is aware of the matter. Also, what might concern users is the fact that JioMoney had established partnerships with other companies like Uber, Sodexo, Snapdeal and Dominos Pizza for facilitating payments.
