The Taipei City Government admitted yesterday that personal information relating to former Taipei City mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City Councilors Lee Chien-chang (李建昌) and Huang Hsiang-chun (黃向群) yesterday condemned Taipei City's Department of Civil Affairs and the Department of Information Technology for posting detailed personal records of mayoral and city councilor candidates on the city government's Web page during the 2002 elections.
Doing so increased the threat of identity fraud and violated the Computer-Processed Personal Data Protection Law, they said.
"The leak of personal records shows that the city government was totally ignorant of information safety. How could the citizens protect their own rights if the city government leaked the personal information that it had?" Lee said yesterday at the Taipei City Council.
Lee also cited a recent incident in the UK where the government lost the personal records of 25 million individuals, including their dates of birth, addresses, bank account numbers and national insurance numbers.
Lee demanded that the city government pay more attention to the management and protection of the municipal information database.
Jason Yeh (
"As the Internet was not so advanced at that time, we did fail to place enough emphasis on the protection of personal records," Yeh said.
Feng said the office had already removed the records from its Web page on Thursday and demanded that all municipal agencies immediately examine their Web pages and stored personal records.
The office will finish all inspections by the end of next month to ensure that this kind of incident will not happen again, Feng said.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
A magnitude 5.7 earthquake yesterday struck off the coast of Hualien, causing brief transportation disruptions in northern and eastern Taiwan, as authorities said that aftershocks of magnitude 5 or higher could occur over the next three days. The quake, which hit at 7:24pm at a depth of 24.5km, registered an intensity of 4 in Hualien and Nantou counties, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. In Taipei, the MRT railway’s operations control center received an earthquake alert and initiated standard safety procedures, briefly halting trains on the Bannan (blue) line for about a minute.
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