Vietnam growned FastGo slips, compromising identity of 300 drivers

FastGo, Vietnam-based new ride-hailing company, accidentally revealed the personal email addresses of 300 drivers right after it sent an email reminder to drivers, urging them to complete the drivers' signup by submitting documents on last Monday, April 1.

In the email, FastGo Singapore put the email address on the “To” field, instead of the usual Blind Carbon Copy (“Bcc”) for confidentiality. All the email recipients then can see other email addresses.

Diep Nguyen, FastGo Singapore country manager said that the team is really sorry and hope that the company's driver-partners will still continue supporting them in the future, as told to The Straits Time.

“It is an important lesson for us to learn about the issue, we promise no more mistakes will happen again as it's affected about 300 drivers that signed up with us,” said Nguyen.

The matter was first made public when a copy of the e-mail uploaded on Facebook by netizen Stanley Raymond Oh, in which FastGo had requested nine sets of documents, including identity cards, driving licences, and bank statements. In the copy, email addresses of the recipients were partially censored.

This incident may result in a potential lawsuit over data breach under the Personal Data Protection Act, as Lionel Tan, a partner at law firm Rajah & Tann specialising in data protection laws pointed out.

“There are a lot of seemingly personal emails in the list, so it is a likely breach unless all recipients have consented that they don't mind their email addresses being circulated,” Tan said.

The Personal Data Protection Commission is said to be looking into the matter to see whether the organisation has proper procedures in place and whether they had educated staff on how to properly handle data. Prior to this incident, SMRT-backed mobilityX also accidentally sent out a mass email revealing the personal addresses of its 500 users.