Imagine this: with just one phone number you have the ability to look at everyone’s location, sometimes even live location in real-time, complete with details like full name, address and father’s name. This is no joke because a rogue website called ProxyEarth is allowing just that.
If you have wondered just how much tracking is possible with just a phone number, you don’t have to wonder anymore: you can just head to ProxyEarth, a rogue website set up by one Rakesh. It is also an example of just what is possible when someone gets into the telecom infrastructure, or when telecom infrastructure is left insecure.
There is a website called ProxyEarth that is leaking location details, including possibly live location, of phone users in India. All you have to do is put in the phone number into the website, and the website reveals details. Sometimes, using triangulation data from telecom towers, it even reveals the live location of a phone user. It is eerily accurate, and scary in its scope.
The website that surfaced a few days ago — we wrote about it here and here — is still live and can be accessed without any hitch. Once on the website, all you have to do is put in a phone number and it fetches details like full name, father’s name, address of the user, alternate number, email ID and other details. The data is fetched from telecom records which we all have supplied to Airtel, Jio, Voda and others while buying the SIM card. In some cases this data is old. But for most users seeing their details available in public like this will come as a huge shock.
India Today earlier even managed to speak to the person who has made the website. The person who has made the website goes by name Rakesh, and he is apparently a programmer and a video editor. He also likely runs a few websites hawking pirated material. He told India Today that he was not doing anything wrong by setting ProxyEarth because he was simply using the data that was already publicly available on internet due to various data leaks. As for the motivation behind creating such a website, Rakesh said: “I am using this website as a platform to attract traffic and to advertise my other products.”
While we have seen again and again private details of Indians leaking on the web, the current one seems particularly scary. This is because the kind of data that is available can easily be used to then create elaborate financial scams. This, of course, in addition to the complete loss of privacy that one suffers when details like father’s name and residential addresses leak on the web.
