New Delhi: The much-awaited, much-feared sting operation by UK-based Channel 4 on alleged sale of customers' personal data by Indian call centre workers was aired on Thursday night.
The sting operation - the video footage of which is posted on Channel 4’s website - showed how data of thousands of British customers could be stolen and sold by unscrupulous call centre employees for as little as $15.
So does the sting bomb have the potential of spelling doom for India’s booming outsourcing sector? As the first reactions to the documentary pour in, there seems to be no clear consensus emerging.
"Off-shoring personal data to India is a time-bomb waiting to explode. But India-bashing must stop," British author Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
While scholars feel there’s no real threat to the outsourcing industry and many prominent firms certifying India as a safe outsourcing destination, UK government is not convinced.
"The Indian outsourcing industry is doing very well in Britain and there is no hostility against it," British Ambassador for Overseas Business, Lord Swraj Paul, was quoted by PTI as saying.
"In Britain, we are very happy about Indian call centres. They have benefited British companies very much," Paul said while releasing a new novel based on outsourcing from India written by Indian journalist-author Neelesh Misra.
Once Upon a Timezone, a romantic comedy, is set in New York and is a story about an Indian call centre. It was launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where India is the guest of honour this year.
British author Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, speaking at the book release said that "off-shoring personal data to India is a time-bomb waiting to explode," he said, adding, "The India-bashing
must stop."
"India is far ahead of us in planning how to operate a service industry with hundreds of thousands of employees accessing personal data on customers," Kobayashi-Hillary said. "We should start listening to their security ideas before the next major data breach takes place on these shores."
UK government orders probe
While intellectuals debate on the issue, the UK government seems to be taking no chances. It has ordered a probe into the security of personal data at Indian telephone call-centres.
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"It appears that some mobile phone companies' call centres in India are being targeted by criminals intent on unlawfully obtaining UK citizens' financial records and this will be the focus of our investigation," UK’s Deputy Information Commissioner, David Smith, said in a statement on Friday.
"We are concerned by any breaches of security particularly if they involve confidential banking details," Smith, whose office is the UK's independent authority to protect personal information, said.
He said if UK firms use an outsourced call centre they are required to ensure security is adequate.
"We are concerned by any breaches of security particularly if they involve confidential banking details,” UK’s Deputy Information Commissioner, David Smith
If they do not, a company could be ordered to stop processing personal information outside the UK, Smith said.
‘We are comfortable with India’
But many leading firms that outsource work to India said they were satisfied with their India operations.
"We are comfortable about the security of our own operations in India," a spokeswoman for Barclays Plc was quoted by news agency Reuters as saying.
The bank said its customers and other bank customers regularly needed to supply their bank or credit card account details to pay for goods and services at other call centres.
HSBC, Britain's biggest bank, said its data security had not been breached and no leak of customer data from its operations in India had been shown in the programme.
Mobile phone companies Orange and Hutchison Whampoa's 3 UK run one call centre each in New Delhi and Mumbai. Both firms said no customer data had been stolen from their centres.
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"All credit and bank card data captured from our customers is encrypted and stored in the UK, under UK law, to ensure the highest levels of protection," 3 UK said in a statement.
BOOM UK payments association APACS said the bank industry was concerned about the access to customer details shown in the programme, but noted the information was not sourced from bank call centres and every bank had strict security measures.
"We are comfortable about the security of our own operations in India," a spokeswoman for Barclays Plc
APACS said banks had anti-fraud guarantees so any customer who was an innocent victim of fraud would get their money back.
Channel 4 acts tough with NASSCOM
Meanwhile, Channel 4 rejected requests from the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), a leading Indian software industry body, to provide details of the alleged wrongdoers so that they could be prosecuted.
"It is not the role of broadcasters or journalists to act as agents of the police or any other authority," the channel said.
British regulators have in the past scrutinised and cleared safety standards in the Indian outsourcing industry.
Britain's Financial Service Authority carried out a probe into standards in India in April 2005 and the Banking Code Standards Board audited eight Indian call centres this year, handling more than a million calls per month from the United Kingdom.
The BCSB report said; "Customer data is subject to the same level of security as in the UK. High risk and more complex processes are subject to higher levels of scrutiny than similar activities onshore."
(With agency inputs) ####
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