Airtel Is Spying On You. The Programmer Who Exposed Airtel Gets Legal Notice From Israel!

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It seems that Airtel is doing a pretty good job at pissing off their customers. In last couple of months, Airtel had been in news for all not so good reasons. First, Net neutrality, Airtel Zero and now THIS.

So this is what actually happened. Airtel reportedly hired a Israeli company, Flash Networks Limited, to develop a software for spying on their users, and collecting their information & usage data, without user’s knowledge. An Indian coder Thejesh GN, while browsing on Airtel 3G, happened to come across the discrepancies in the codes and exposed Airtel for their unethical practice. Now, the funny part: the Israeli company, who developed the software for Airtel, sent the Indian coder a C&D (Cease & Desist) letter and is threatening to sue him.

Thejesh GN

On June 3, 2015, Thejesh GN, an infoactivist and a programmer from Bengaluru, noticed that Airtel was secretly injecting JavaScript into user browsing sessions. Check out the screenshot shared by him where he pointed out the malicious script.

Exposed Airtel For injecting JavaScript

Thejesh's tweet Exposing Airtel

Airtel was trying to alter user behavior by inserting a toolbar into the user’s browsing session. In layman’s terms, Airtel was collecting user information without user permission, something that’s unethical and is a malpractice in the truest sense of the word.

Airtel caught inserting a toolbar

If that wasn’t enough, Thejesh also received a legal notice (Cease & Desist) from an Israeli company named Flash Networks Limited.

Thejesh received Cease & Desist letter

Here, you can read the entire legal notice sent to Theejesh.

The company also sent a DMCA takedown notice to Github and they have now removed the code and screenshots uploaded by Thejesh.

Airtel DMCA takedown notice to Github

It’s confirmed that Airtel (and even Vodafone) are clients of Flash Networks Limited, the same company that sent Thejesh the notice. What we could not understand why an Israeli company is threatening an Indian programmer for exposing the truth about Indian telecom companies?

Source: Reddit

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