In the latest article by Philstar, Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has announced that they’ll be requiring everyone who will be renewing their passports to bring their birth certificates as its previous outsourced passport maker has “took away” all of its applicants data according to Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr.

“We are rebuilding our files from scratch because previous outsourced passport maker took all the data when contract (was) terminated,” Locsin said in his Twitter account.

“Because previous contractor got pissed when terminated it made off with data. We did nothing about it or couldn’t because we were in the wrong. It won’t happen again. Passports pose national security issues and cannot be kept back by private entities. Data belongs to the state,” Locsin said in another tweet.

And now, applicants renewing their brown, green, or maroon machine-readable passports are now required to submit birth certificates.

Well, we should really care about this because a private entity has held our data and information which is a massive security and data breach for the Filipinos.

Why should we be worried?

Since the private entity or the passport maker “took away” our data and information, it is possible that they can use these information to their advantage. Not only that, it is also possible that they can share these data and information to others so they can use it.

To make it simple, this is really important as these data can be use by other people to influence our decisions (e.g. Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal) and it can be use as a tool to harm or to control us.

In short, these personal data that they have is important and if it is in the wrong hands, it can be used to harm us. Oh and yeah, these information can be solve to identity thieves.

I hope that National Privacy Commission will intervene to help up us all as this is a very important matter.

Source: Philstar