Is Ola Cabs leaking customers' personal details?

Taxi service apps seem to be hitting headlines for all wrong reasons more than often. The latest is, Ola Cabs, that has found itself embroiled in a controversy related to data leak.  When Swapnil Midha from Chennai booked an Ola Cab, she was taken by surprise as she started receiving some gibberish SMSes that she said were ‘alpha-numeric with hashes and made no sense’. “My phone beeped throughout the night. 1:06, 2:34, 2:37, 2:38, 4:05, 5:17. I couldn’t get my head around why these were coming at these times. I then called their call centre the next day to explain that there was probably some sort of bug and my number had somehow gotten into their highly cryptic message transmission systems, whatever secrets they were trying to transmit,” she said in a Facebook post. She received around 300 to 400 texts from them. Reaching out to Ola and expecting them to resolve her issue was another problem. “Estimate a total of between 300 and 400 texts from them so far. I reached out to them through every channel possible. I called their call centre at least 5 times, demanded to speak to the senior managers, and had to explain my problem each time in great detail, answering the same annoying questions,” she further wrote in the post. The customer service has several questions but no resolution. She then started looking at the texts more carefully and saw Ola was sending her confirmation messages of customers who made a booking even in Bangalore, though she lived in Chennai. “Ola was sharing with me, personal details of their customers throughout the day and throughout the night. It’s lucky I’m not a psychopath roaming the streets of Bangalore, waiting to get my hands on people’s personal information and knowing when they are home and when they are not, isn’t it,” she said. She wrote emails, sent tweets, tried to reason with call centre, and finally decided to call up the customers on their phone numbers and tell them about the issue about their personal details getting leaked. Finally, after three weeks and some media coverage, Ola Cabs responded and said they have fixed the problem. It was just recently in June that Ola was **reportedly hacked** , but the company said there was no security lapse, whatsoever to any user data.