Hyderabad: A week after being served a Cease and Desist notice from Israeli tech firm Flash Networks for highlighting a code it had hidden inside Airtel’s 3G network that illegally collected user data, tech-activist and blogger Thejesh G.N. has replied to the notice with a legal reply, demanding that they apologise for violation of privacy.
The four-page legal document, that was also published on Thejesh’ website, listed out the steps in which he had found the code that was injecting a javascript called Anchor.js that was hidden in browsers and tracked user data. The document also specified that Thejesh had only followed “industry protocol by publishing the necessary lines of code” along with screenshots on GitHub.com, an online repository service.
The document demands that the company apologise for “attempting to insert a malicious piece of code” into Thejesh’s web data, violating privacy. Thejesh discovered the script earlier this month. However, Flash Networks sent him a legal notice. Airtel then stated that the script was used to build a tool that allows its users to track their data usage.
