Alleged personal details of TRAI chairman R S Sharma were leaked after he threw a challenge and tweeted his 12-digit Aadhaar number.
An all-out war erupted on Twitter after Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) Chairman R S Sharma on Saturday disclosed his Aadhaar number on the microblogging site and challenged everyone to show how mere knowledge of the unique number could be used to harm him, triggering a deluge of tweets that claimed to disclose his personal details — from PAN to mobile number.
The challenge by Sharma evoked an immediate response from the Twitterati, with some users claiming to have dug up his mobile number, photographs, residential address, date of birth and even chat threads using the information, while others warned him about the perils of throwing such a dare on the social media platform.
While much of the information that was dug out might already be in the public domain, the TRAI official did not verify whether the details pertaining to his PAN were indeed correct.
When contacted earlier in the evening, Sharma declined to make any detailed comment on the matter by saying, "Let the challenge run for some time".
What the TRAI chairman's challenge was about:
"My Aadhaar number is 7621 7768 2740. Now I give this challenge to you: Show me one concrete example where you can do any harm to me," tweeted Sharma, whose tenure ends on August 9.
A Twitter user had earlier asked Sharma to "walk your talk" after the TRAI chief tweeted his interview with an online portal in which he strongly defended Aadhaar and rejected apprehensions that one billion Aadhaar accounts were vulnerable.
He said there had not been a single instance of data being breached and had there been one, the entire Aadhaar database would have been vulnerable.
