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NEW DELHI: There seems to be no end to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's (Trai) goof-ups. In a bizarre incident, a passionate love letter, has appeared on the Trai website.

As part of the process in which the regulatory body published comments on net neutrality from all stake-holders, the Trai has not only made public email IDs of all users but has also put a love letter from a user, perhaps unintentionally sent to the authority, on its website.

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While it would be difficult to blame the Trai for not being able to filter out this unrelated email since it had to deal with more than a million e-mails that it received, it's now clear that Trai did not abide by its own privacy policy which states:

"TRAI-Website does not automatically capture any specific personal information from you, (like name, phone number or e-mail address), that allows us to identify you individually.

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If the TRAI-Website requests you to provide personal information, you will be informed for the particular purposes for which the information is gathered and adequate security measures will be taken to protect your personal information. We do not sell or share any personally identifiable information volunteered on the TRAI-Website to any third party (public/private). Any information provided to this website will be protected from loss, misuse, unauthorized access or disclosure, alteration, or destruction.

We gather certain information about the User, such as Internet protocol (IP) addresses, domain name, browser type, operating system, the date and time of the visit and the pages visited. We make no attempt to link these addresses with the identity of individuals visiting our site unless an attempt to damage the site has been detected."

This essentially implies that Trai should not have made public any personally identifiable information including the names of users and their full email IDs. The authority should have redacted the email addresses if it was essential to publish them.

The move had led to widespread criticism of Trai, slamming the organization for making it easy for spammers to get a huge database of email IDs in one fell swoop.

Hacker group Anonymous India had also claimed to have brought down Trai's official website following the public release of email IDs from which the body received responses regarding net neutrality. In a series of tweets, Anonymous India claimed responsibility for bringing down train.gov.in and also warned that the site will soon be hacked. It looks like the group has launched a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack on the website to make it inaccessible. The site was down for a couple of hours on April 28.

Trai on March 27 had put up a consultation paper on its website asking users to give their views on net neutrality in India. The last day to vote for the campaign was April 24.

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