MANILA, Philippines – (UPDATED) Foreign Secretary Teodoro “Teddyboy” Locsin Jr said that a former contractor for Philippine passports “took off” with personal data after the end of its contract with the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA).
Locsin bared this in a tweet on Tuesday, January 8, in reaction to a Twitter thread about passport renewal where some foreign embassies require a birth certificate instead of just accepting the expired passport.
He retweeted a Twitter user from that thread and commented that the old passport “is 1,000% ID better than [the] birth certificate.”
“But we are rebuilding our files from scratch because previous outsourced passport maker took all the data when contract terminated,” said Locsin.
He further explained that the previous contractor “got pissed when [the contract was] terminated” and “it made off with [the] data. We did nothing about it or couldn’t because we were in the wrong.”
Locsin has yet to mention the name of the contractor.
“It won’t happen again. Passports pose national security issues and cannot be kept back by private entities. Data belongs to the state,” he added.
Netizens expressed concern about this incident, but Locsin said that it is “not a question of data privacy.”
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From : Rappler / 12 January 2019
Link : https://www.rappler.com/nation/220808-teddyboy-locsin-says-passport-data-taken-away-ex-contractor
