IT IS shocking to hear that the terminated passport contractor of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) "took all" the personal information of passport holders.
The incident raises a lot of questions. Is our government truly able to protect all the sensitive information that we feed to them when we apply for identification cards or other documents? Were there any safeguards in place to protect the information we provided them?
Now DFA wants applicants for passport renewal to submit birth certificates in a bid to rebuild the data lost. They are simply adding another burden to the applicants who wish to get a renewal. What used to be a fast transaction will now be slower and longer because of their blunder.
"Applicants should not be burdened by submitting original copies of their certificates of live birth, obtaining which requires another application process before the Philippine Statistics Authority, to renew their passports just because the producer lost their relevant data," Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said.
The DFA could have come up with a much more efficient solution in recovering the data. They are at fault why this happened; they should not burden other people to solve their issues. Those important information would not have been taken away from them should they have secured those data properly.
The government should also exert all means under its power to recover the information that were taken by the ex-contractor.
The government must also re-evaluate its system on how our personal information are being protected or stored. It should check if the current safeguards are enough to protect data breach.
The DFA should also take this matter seriously. Instead of pointing fingers, it should get itself together and resolve the issue as soon as possible. The data that were taken from them may be used against these individuals.
If the government does not act fast on this or re-evaluate its current systems on data protection, then we can expect a similar data breach in the future.