PropNex has been fined $10,000 by the Personal Data Protection Commission, after it inadvertently leaked the personal data of 1,765 individuals online – the second time the real estate industry has been in the news over data privacy issues in the past three years. The privacy watchdog began investigating PropNex in Dec 2015, after an unnamed woman complained that her name and mobile number, including those of her sisters, were found in an unsecured PDF file that were freely available online. As a result, she and her sisters had been receiving unsolicited marketing messages and calls from telemarketers and moneylenders. In its decision released earlier in the week, the commission noted that while PropNex removed the PDF file containing one item or all of the information – name, mobile number, e-mail address and residential address – of 1,765 persons in Jan 2016, the document had been posted on the Internet for several months. This comes as PropNex failed to detect the huge security flaw in its system for five months, despite periodic testings. With this, the commission ruled that PropNex violated the PDPA when it failed to take reasonable security measures to protect the personal data under its control or possession.... Continue Reading