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Low awareness underlies Indonesia’s cybersecurity woes
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Despite a barrage of cybersecurity threats and data breaches that have exposed Indonesia’s vulnerabilities, public electronic service providers still seem unbothered by the policy divide that has put the personal data of millions of people at risk. (Shutterstock/PopTika)
L
ow awareness and accountability among public electronic service providers (ESPs) continue to be the bane of Indonesia’s weak data-protection landscape, experts have said, as protection measures continue to lag behind the nation’s speedy digital transformation.
Despite a barrage of cybersecurity threats and data breaches that have exposed Indonesia’s vulnerabilities, authorities still seem unbothered by the policy divide that has put the personal data of millions of people at risk.
The government’s intention to expand the use of the PeduliLindungi surveillance application, for instance, has raised questions over compliance with personal data-protection principles, said Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (ELSAM) executive director Wahyudi Djafar.
Among the issues ELSAM has raised is compliance with the principles of lawfulness and transparency, closely linked with the legal basis for personal-data processing.
As an app that was developed for a public purpose – to aid the pandemic response – its legal use should not extend to disclosing or transferring data to other public data controllers, Wahyudi said.
The data controller and the ESP, which in this case is the Health Ministry, must clearly inform its users about how their data is processed, which includes disclosing the purpose of processing, what data is collected and potential access by third parties. Meanwhile, the problem of authentication continues to pose unmitigated risks for data protection.
PeduliLindungi garnered notoriety earlier this month after social media users managed to download and circulate President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s COVID-19 vaccine certificate by entering his national identification number (NIK) into the app, which was easily searchable online.
