Madhya Pradesh: Data Uploaded On Hamare Shikshak App May Be Leaked Or Sold, Says Teachers

Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): A section of government school teachers from the state is worried that their personal data uploaded on Hamare Shikshak App may be leaked, sold or hacked.

They say that the data is stored on the servers of a New York-based company called Median.co, which hosts the App, and it has Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Chinese nationals among its key personnel.

The Hamare Shikshak App is used by the teachers to mark their attendance digitally and the teachers have been opposing the government’s decision to make its use compulsory.

Madhya Pradesh Shikshak Sangh, a registered organisation of school teachers, had submitted a memorandum to the Directorate of Public Instruction (DPI) recently, demanding a probe by a cyber agency to ensure the safety of the data.

Meanwhile, several teachers have complained that they are receiving calls from Pakistan and that their bank accounts - the details of which are also available on the App- have been hacked and money has been siphoned off from them. The MP Atithi Shikshak Sangh has also raised the issue.

Sensitive personal data of around four lakh regular and guest teachers including their Aadhaar card, iris scan, photographs, date of birth, address, name of parents etc are stored in servers based in the United States. The App can also trace their location using GIS.

They say that Weiyin He, the chief technology officer of the company is Chinese, Hunaid Hassan, an engineering graduate from the University of Punjab, Pakistan, is its director of engineering. Besides, the company also has Tyler Lee, a Chinese on its rolls as accounts executive and Abdullah Abul Hossain from Pakistan as a software engineer.

“The owner of Hamare Shikshak App, which is school education department, is responsible for ensuring the security and safety of the data,” Madhya Pradesh Shikshak Sangh president Kshatraveer Singh Rathore told Free Press.

When contacted, a senior DPI official said the apprehensions of the teachers were baseless. “In today’s globalised world, companies handling data are professionally managed. The location of the company and the nationalities of its employees don’t matter,” he added.