One million passports leaked online

https://www.theverge.com/tech/947157/passports-data-breach-cannabis-club-systems-nefos-puffpal

by jruohonen • 25 days ago

413 235 25 days ago

theverge.com

https://web.archive.org/web/20260617075233/https://www.theve...

https://archive.ph/n2HnK

adithyaharish• 25 days ago

I am sure even my passport would be part of the breach, are the passport holders beign notified of the breach?

dgellow4• 24 days ago

Oh god that’s pretty bad

The documents were hosted by systems used by cannabis clubs and a company called Nefos, which operates PuffPal, a platform that manages membership and age verification for cannabis retailers and clubs across Europe. The infrastructure storing these identity documents—full passport scans, driver’s licenses with photos, names, and identifying numbers—was left completely unprotected on publicly accessible web servers.

I cannot imagine the level of fines under GDPR for leaking that much PII

real_chudson• 24 days ago

The EU's verification laws will ensure much more of these leaks in the future, and therefore much more fines

dgellow4• 24 days ago

Yep… not sure about more fines, but for sure more leaks

Kuinox2• 24 days ago

How so, are you purely speculating or you found a hole in the zero knowledge proof system some countries are implementing ?

forestry• 24 days ago

Is it requirement to retain the documents? Many are waiting for gatekeeper tech companies to organise around attestation rather than submission to third parties. I hope they are making progress.

TacticalCoder• 23 days ago

I had to receive a letter from France (I'm not french, I don't live in France, but we've got family real estate there). To be able to open this letter, online (!), I had to scan my EU ID card, tilt it, and scan my face (pointing at the camera, looking to the left, etc.).

We're talking about a major french institution here, either public or private but colluding with the government to have their monopoly (don't know, don't care: they're all the same worms to me).

Speaking of which... There's been a recent case in France where a very nice lady working for some public institution (basically the IRS) was giving the name/wealth of "targets" to her brother so that her brother and his friends could go and kidnap/torture (fingers of victims have been cut) family members of rich french persons.

It's sickening and the real culprits are those creating the laws mandating this full on surveillance apparatus.

ExoticPearTree2• 23 days ago

The EU's verification laws will ensure much more of these leaks in the future, and therefore much more fines

So its a feature, not a bug and a clever revenue stream for the governments?

voakbasda• 23 days ago

Show me the consequences. I hear there are supposed to be repercussions, but these asshats never seem to pay for their crimes.

hahahaa3• 23 days ago

Why can't verification simply be go to post office, clerk will affadavit that you presented correct ID via online form. Which could also do the photo lookup for good measure.

Store that fact in the computer. Good for one ID usage. Good for less critical stuff like this weed thing (versus say a visa application which may need to store).

The analogy is a nightclub bouncer checks your ID.

simoncion• 23 days ago

The analogy is a nightclub bouncer checks your ID.

...the obvious thing to deploy is a cannabis club bouncer that checks your ID with only his eyes and hands and either bounces you or lets you in, depending on the outcome of that check.

That's far simpler than involving some unrelated third party and far more secure than storing any information about the event in any computer.

raverbashing• 24 days ago

That's good, just grab one of those whenever your need to prove your age online /s

Cider9986• 23 days ago

For liveness i suppose you need a good graphics card.

So dystopian

sebastiennight2• 23 days ago

a good graphics card

Well, see, for safety reasons we're not going to let consumers have those anymore. You could be doing all kinds of shenanigans, running LLMs locally like a pirate.

jubilee33• 23 days ago

Not even needed many times, I was recently at an overseas airport that wanted you to scan your passport to log into the internet. Ya not happening. On another device I downloaded a "sample" passport image of a British passport, the first one on Google images, pointed the phone at the device screen. "This will never work" , he thought as he was immediately logged in. All this stuff really hurts the people who follow the rules the most.

gertrunde• 24 days ago

The lack of security is one thing, but why have they retained the information at all!

iirc, one of the elements of GDPR is "storage limitation", i.e. you must not keep personal data for longer than you need it - and in this case, the data is only needed to verify the age of the user, and shouldn't ever be required again (unless people can now get younger).

Once a document has been used to verify a person's identity and that the person is of legal age, there is no reason to retain a copy of the document any more.

It would be reasonable and fair to retain a photo of the user to verify that the person matches the account, but that's it.

rationalist• 24 days ago

10 years after I took the ACT, I received a letter from a university that I never went to, saying my SSN was leaked.

WHY THE F**k ARE THEY HOLDING ON TO THAT 10 YEARS LATER!?!?!?

Of course now I know better than to give out my SSN to anyone who asks for it, but I didn't know that as a teenager.

Until stupid s**t like this becomes illegal, it will just keep continuing.

robrtsql• 23 days ago

Don't be so hard on 17-ish-year-old you. What exactly were you supposed to do? Not take the ACT (and probably not get into your desired college)?

cute_boi• 23 days ago

I think every SSN is already leaked and government is doing nothing. I tried to change SSN and they told me it is not possible.

frollogaston2• 23 days ago

I've had stuff like this happen too, and always wondered if they really leaked my data or were just notifying everyone whose data they possibly leaked.

Sohcahtoa82• 23 days ago

The real answer?

In case you want to retrieve your test scores 10 years after you took it. They need some way to uniquely identify you. Sure, they could have given you a specific test taker ID, but what if you lost that? They could have created a way for you to log in with an e-mail address, but what if you changed e-mail addresses?

You might think "Why would I need my test scores from 10+ years ago?", but my wife just started a job and they demanded her college transcripts to prove she went there...over 20 years ago.

TZubiri5• 23 days ago

I'm not american, but the idea that your SSN, which is effectively a (federal) unique identifier for a person, would be secret, is very foreign.

In most countries, like most databases, our primary keys do not hold an expectation of secrecy.

I would even argue that the expectation of secrecy is what creates it's secret semantics, that is, it's secret because you make it secret. I get that it's a collective action thing, if you just publish your own SSN, a bank in another state might not be aware it's a public thing for YOU, and might open an account for a stranger.

Interestingly enough, for corporations, their identifiers, EIN, are not assumed to be private, in many states these are available through the DoS public records. So it turns out the system works just fine if you make the ID of a person (juristic or legal) public.

Tangurena27• 22 days ago

My first university, back in the 1970s, used my SSN as my student ID and was embossed into the ID card (who is that stranger in the photo?). Nowadays, no university uses SSN for student IDs. There's a saying that applies: the past is a foreign country.

dotancohen2• 23 days ago

  > Once a document has been used to verify a person's identity and that the person is of legal age, there is no reason to retain a copy of the document any more.

Might KYC laws and general CYA policies prefer to keep the proof of age? For instance to protect e.g. against a minor altering the date on their passport. Especially in such a regulated industry.

charles_f6• 23 days ago

The EDPB has explicitly ruled on that, when it comes to age verification^1, you should delete: "Trust models are crucial to prevent data breaches in age assurance contexts [...] once the user's age is verified, no record of the personal data used for the age assurance process is kept".

^1: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/documents/2025-04/ed..., number 36.

joe_mamba• 23 days ago

Damn, we even got passport leaks before GTA 6.

emayljames• 23 days ago

This is the best one. Not a shady company website, or a paywalled site:

https://boingboing.net/2026/06/28/a-million-passports-leaked...

tartoran• 23 days ago

Note what happened. A high-value credential—a passport—was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it’s the low-value system that got hacked, putting the high-value credential at risk.

Why do these systems hold onto user's data post verification?

observationist• 23 days ago

Why wouldn't they? There are probbaly significant downsides if they fail an audit requirement, and they're probably mandated to retain records for some period, with no consequences to extended retention.

Set up a system so that it costs you nothing to do a bad thing but possibly wrecks you legally and financially to do the good thing, and people will inevitably do the bad thing. They shouldn't be collecting this information in the first place.

The people who design these policies are incapable of actually building things that work. They are not the intelligent, competent leaders exercising a careful craft that they like to pretend they are.

They keep going after age verification, online ID, central bank digital currencies, etc - keep this incident in mind. The people who implement and write these policies are morons. They don't game things out and plan for redundancy or resiliency. They don't take into account bad faith actors. They don't account for deliberate exploitation of the system.

charles_f6• 23 days ago

Why wouldn't they?

They most likely weren't allowed to keep it past the verification per GDPR art.5. Once the passport has been verified for whatever purpose they needed it ("age verified to be > 18yo on 2026-06-12" or "identity verified to be XXXX YYYY"), there is no legitimate use for the passport photo and details anymore, and they should delete it.

TZubiri5• 23 days ago

Why wouldn't they? There are probbaly significant downsides if they fail an audit requirement,

Right, and keeping old passports used for verification should cause an audit to fail.

TZubiri5• 23 days ago

I have a story about this, although it's a bit convoluted and not entirely related. But it does showcase low-value usecase compromising a high-value auth mechanism.

I was working on a project, client is a Real Estate agency, they use a CRM where they upload houses and it in turn uploads it to various sites like Zillow. We needed a list of their listed houses, so we wanted to use that data source instead of making a CRUD where they have to add houses yet again.

We ask the CRM sales team about APIs, they tell us that there's no accounts for third parties, client accounts have APIs, so we have to ask the client for an API key (or for their account password).

Which makes sense in general I guess, but the data is public in our case, so the CRM sales staff 's idea was that we should ask the client to let us access their account in order to get public data. We proceeded to scrape the houses from a website like Zillow like cavemen.

As it happens, our project was ancilliary low-value. So I don't doubt that the clients of this CRM are vulnerable in a similar way, and the root cause of the issue isn't evident at all, I can see 2:

1- Paradoxically, having an API that always requires an API KEY (as opposed to allowing unauthenticated access for public data) is less secure, as credentials/tokens will be used more often when not necessary.

2- This CRM effectively acted as an aggregator, consuming the APIs to publish to other vendors, but they don't provide an API for other vendors to read data from them. This effectively causes third party vendors to authenticate as the client, which is just incorrect. Credentials should identify a person/group, not a usecase.

bee_rider• 23 days ago

This is a really great story. It is super short and understandable, and nails the point that just falling into the default case of authenticating everything can hurt security. If someone was teaching a some sort of software engineering seminar, they should totally steal it.

mothballed5• 23 days ago

I'm not sure how it works in the EU, but in the US, most states have a "PMP" (prescription monitoring program) that tracks the sale of marijuana in many states (nevermind that its not an actual prescription, but it is a controlled substance) and viewable by your doctor back up to ~12 months or so. Most people don't know this however and think it works like alcohol sales where it's sold after ID verification and then everyone forgets about it. Some states treat marijuana sales like prescription drug dispensing, it has to be reported to a central database including the intimate details of the persons involved. I have no idea if this is the case in Spain, however.

subscribed7• 23 days ago

EU is not a country and the laws covering illicit substances vary wildly between member states.

edoceo2• 23 days ago

It's not like this in USA for cannabis. States with medical programs issue medical cards and the dispensary uses that as the only form of ID. For adult-recreational the dispensary can choose their ID verification system. Many use ID scanners connected to their online POS provider. The State run system doesn't track retail sales to an individual.

baliex• 23 days ago

In a word: complaints.

It’s somewhat understandable but also part of the problem.

ishouldstayaway• 23 days ago

Why do these systems hold onto user's data post verification?

Depending on the company, you could rate the reasons on a scale from "incompetence/naivete" to "revenue stream".

hombre_fatal2• 23 days ago

There are various reasons. What if it turned out someone was using a stolen ID or a fake ID, or the ID didn't match the face, or it wasn't even an ID? You'd want to be able to see how your process missed it.

The real problem is that there aren't many options for real authentication over getting people to upload pictures of high-value credentials. Now every service has to be a security expert, like encrypting the images at rest so they aren't the ones who leak it.

It's kind of like how dumb our credit card system is where you have to both share a secret with everyone (from random websites to random restaurants) while hoping the bad guys never get it because the secret can be used anywhere. It kinda works against everyone except the bad guys.

Maybe it's time we come up with a deliberate system.

ehnto• 23 days ago

You'd want to be able to see how your process missed it.

An incredible risk to take on someone elses behalf, for personal gain. Don't worry, market forces will surely fix this, no need for regulation.

somenameforme2• 23 days ago

The leak came from a third party ID/age verification service for a regulated substance in a heavily regulated region. I think there's a good chance that they're under various regulatory/KYC type laws that would make holding onto user data mandatory. One practical scenario where this would come into play is if they were suspected of intentionally accepting fraudulent credentials, basically acting like a fake ID service for hire. In that case authorities would want to be able to see all data that they were basing acceptance on.

vfclists• 23 days ago

Do the laws that mandate identity verification set security standards that the websites which collect and verify the data must meet?

shmoobadge2• 23 days ago

Much as passports are very important for proving identity etc, people who travel have had their passport scanned, photographed or photocopied by pretty much every hotel they've stayed in. I'm not sure the shoebox in the backroom in Koh Samui with the photocopies in constitutes good storage hygiene protocols.

How that doesn't turn into rampant identity theft I don't know, or maybe it does? Not, happily, for me... yet.

Avshalom• 23 days ago

the whole "not being an automatable remote sql injection away from everything" quality of physical objects grants a filing cabinet a tremendous amount of inherent security compared to anything digital.

Terr_2• 23 days ago

Much like that old quip about the bandwidth of a vehicle full of tapes: "Never underestimate the at-rest security of a room full of filing cabinets."

Friction and delay have always been aspects of security.

wisemang• 23 days ago

Nothing says “we’re watching you” like the wifi password at the hotel I stayed at in Shanghai being my passport number.

nkrisc• 23 days ago

Stealing a shoebox of photocopied passports from every hotel in the city sounds like way more work and way riskier than downloading an already aggregated trove of digital data.

shmoobadge2• 23 days ago

Ok, how about the google photos archive from the hotel next door with 1000s of pictures of passports taken on the shared unlocked $100 android phone that sits on the front desk? Not millions I grant you, but again, there doesn't seem to be an issue with active exploitation of these.

annzabelle2• 23 days ago

My guess is that the machine readable chip standards and the production quality required to replicate a physical passport are high enough that only the most organized of organized crime can fake the highest value passports effectively, and if a passport is easy to replicate, it is less likely to have visa free access to most countries.

To second the photographed/photocopied requirements, as an expat, I am frequently asked to send a scan of my passport to people or entities that are not necessarily the most secure.

I also have a couple of important documents that are literally PDFs. My Canadian citizenship certificate is a PDF with a barcode in it, that I can print off a copy of if I need to mail it, or show on my phone to a consular office or a border guard if needed. My work visa here in New Zealand is a PDF with my passport number and a visa number, which my workplace and bank checked with an online database. Fundamentally, these and my passport are pointers to a row in various databases.

SXX2• 23 days ago

AFAIK not all NFC-enabled passports support Active Authentication. E.g least before US passports did not support it so cloning them is as easy as reading them via NFC.

So you cant fake non-existing passport because of issuer signature, but cloning is not a rocket science for many countries passports.

VladVladikoff• 23 days ago

I am working on hotel software. And we are doing an automated kiosk check in with identity scanning. I’m seriously stressed about holding on to this kind of toxic waste. I am trying to limit it as much as possible. For example throwing away scans as fast as possible (within regulatory allowances). But I would love to hear any ideas anyone has in terms of further security. Obviously the documents are not just on a public bucket. But I’m considering maybe encrypting each document with a separate key, or something along those lines.

ashley95• 23 days ago

Encrypt the data with an asymmetric key; and keep the decryption key somewhere offline. You can get a hardware token to store the key on (I think a yubikey can do this).

fy20• 23 days ago

At smaller hotels or hostels I've had the staff take photos of ID with their own personal devices.

lifestyleguru9• 23 days ago

Nothing starts better a stay at a new place, than (most likely) illegal immigrant working (most likely) illegally at the reception of a grubby hotel or hostel taking photo of my passport with their private smartphone. Then I really fell that everything will go well and that I'm safe.

bluebarbet3• 23 days ago

Same. Many times. This cat is out of the bag.

Scaled• 23 days ago

I had my identity stolen this way before.

Since then, I do not allow the scans anymore. It is a dreadful feeling showing up to a hotel not knowing if you'll get turned away at the last minute because you take a stand for your privacy. So far, none have been willing to lose the bookings, but I know sooner or later my luck will run out and I'll have to find last minute accomodations.

mattrighetti• 22 days ago

people who travel have had their passport scanned, photographed or photocopied by pretty much every hotel they've stayed in.

This. I hate it. People expect you to send your documents on messaging apps and god only knows where they end up. Unfortunately, I fear there's nothing we can do to stop this as govs enforce this kind of operations.

deanc• 22 days ago

It's far worse than that. In a lot of cases when you pay on booking.com, they don't charge your card. Instead, they send all your information (including CVV) along to the hotel where they can charge you how they want. A hotel I visited in Austria, had my card details printed out on a piece of A4 paper.

didntknowyou• 22 days ago

that shoebox would prob be thrown or burnt at some point tho, rather than being accessed by savvy hackers from across the globe.

charles_f6• 23 days ago

Zero password protection on document storage systems > No encryption for sensitive identity verification data > Public URL access with no authentication requirements > No access logging or monitoring systems in place

Pretty much the bingo of secure storage, even CTF demos make it less obvious. Storing a document that they have no business keeping in the first place, with no security whatsoever.

maipen• 23 days ago

So much of our information is being leaked nowadays that news like these don’t surprise me anymore…

I think everyone should understand that if they truly want something private, storing it offline or destroying it completely, are the only safer options.

Any sort of convenience to access said data, is a possible surface of attack.

croes• 23 days ago

No hacking was required—documents were accessible through direct URLs with zero authentication or encryption.

You would be surprised what some courts already count as hacking

spullara• 23 days ago

Remember that there is no such thing as identity theft. There is just fraud. You weren't involved at all.

lifestyleguru9• 23 days ago

Identity theft is a term made up by banks and institutions who don't want to take responsibility for who they sign contracts with. Despite billions of profits they have every year.

petilon2• 22 days ago

Exactly. We should stop saying "Identity Theft" because that lets financial institutions off the hook. "Identity Theft" sounds like it is either your fault for being careless with your identity, or the thief's fault for stealing it. How about "Negligent Verification Fraud"? That makes it clear it is the fault of the bank. It is impersonation enabled by the bank's lax verification process.

cebert• 23 days ago

PuffPal, a platform that manages membership and age verification for cannabis retailers and clubs across Europe.

At least we’re keeping the children safe though by verifying ages. It’s worth giving up privacy for that…

hahahaa3• 23 days ago

Yep. Teenagers are famously incapable of finding a dealer who might even be their mate.

throwaway6926753• 23 days ago

I'm aware of another batch of leaked passports, from a few years ago.

A family member was booking a school tour, when he noticed the URL of the Travel CRM included an id number. Sure enough, the CRM would return all his details given only the (sequential) id number without a need for credentials: high resolution passport scan, and all the other details provided when booking an overseas trip.

He notified the CRM company, and that email was ignored. He emailed again, proposing disclosure, and the problem was silently fixed with no response.

A few months later he mentioned it to the school, along with the fact that he had followed up and had the vulnerability fixed. The school went straight into panic mode, called him to the principal's office and forced him to write a statement so they could refer him to the Feds. I intervened, explaining that he was the good guy who got the vulnerability fixed, and the problem was the school's, since they had supposedly vetted the CRM for security when choosing a tour company.

All of a sudden from the school's point of view there was no problem and no need to mention it to any of the people whose information had been disclosed, despite my insistence. The people still haven't been notified. The school did acknowledge that the family member had done the right thing and verbally thanked him, but would not put anything in writing.

The people involved in the tour had their details leaked, but there was nothing special about those people in the system, so realistically every person whose details were in that CRM had their details, including passports, leaked. It was a major travel CRM provider, so the number of people in the system would have been 6 or 7 figures.

The kicker is that the family member was employed by a software company that had the school system as a customer. The IT person who was responsible for vetting the travel CRM (and had verbally thanked him) arranged for the school system to phone his employer and deliver an ultimatum: that the family member be sacked or they would risk losing a customer. The family member got the sack.

gomoboo• 23 days ago

After all of that why protect the company by not mentioning their name?

throwaway6926753• 23 days ago

Because it's not worth it. I'm protecting the family member, not the company.

The image of people standing up for the noble whistleblower is far from the truth. Disclosing the company here won't achieve anything apart from garnering a few karma points and generating some short lived outrage at the company.

I'd consider disclosing it to the ICO, and made tentative steps in that direction at the time, but it's not clear that they are interested and whose interests they would protect.

Here's a question that might make this discussion useful: What is people's experience of reporting data breaches to the UK's ICO? In your case, was meaningful action taken by the ICO and was the person doing the reporting protected? .

tempfile2• 23 days ago

If you can't actually substantiate these claims (they probably can't prove it, even if it's true) then this could be a very expensive claim to make.

tempfile2• 23 days ago

The family member got the sack.

Isn't this classic wrongful termination?

throwaway6926753• 23 days ago

It wasn't worth pursuing, partly because it was a part time job. A bit sad, as the company had promised to sponsor him though further study. It was the right decision, as it turned out to be less effort than a court case to get better opportunities with other companies.

6_7• 23 days ago

I'm sorry, how many figures?

the_bear• 22 days ago

I run a small CRM company that serves some travel agents (we're not travel-specific, but we have a lot of small broker/agent businesses using us). We have ~11,000 customers with ~25,000 users between them, and our database stores ~100 million contacts, so about 4k contacts per user.

Most of those contacts are probably random leads that got imported, not actual clients that would have uploaded their passport info, but it seems reasonable to think that a CRM of our size (which, again, is not very big) that served exclusively travel agents would have millions of actual "clients" with passport info. 1 million passports across 25k users would just be 40 per user. If you assume a typical trip is for a family of four, that would mean the average user has just booked 10 international trips ever which seems pretty low to me.

I want to reiterate that we're not travel-specific and we don't have a feature for capturing passport info, etc., so I'm really just commenting on the volume of records that might be impacted by something like this.

bonoboTP• 23 days ago

I admire the naive optimism of someone who'd expect otherwise but why would you? If you want to pursue such a thing, get a lawyer because you're now legal enemies with the school leadership and this should be obvious the moment you start thinking getting yourself involved in such an affair.

croisillon• 23 days ago

i could swear i have read that same story here before but can't find it

petit_robert2• 22 days ago

It tends to happen with a reasonable certainty to most whistleblowers, from what I gather.

So yes, you can swear you read that same story before, and I could swear you will read it again :-\

hahahaa3• 23 days ago

The cannabis link makes it much worse as you have a bit of information about the person in addition to the passport which is a perfect ID.

JSR_FDED• 23 days ago

Well this should keep the transfer stations going for a bit longer.

monksy• 23 days ago

Don't forget to send your congress person a reminder about what their vote for age verificiation systems does.

Find your rep at congress.gov. Email or mail them this article.

dang5• 23 days ago

[stub for offtopicness]

dgellow4• 24 days ago

Could we update the link to the original article? https://cambridgeanalytica.org/data-breaches-scandals/passpo...

ericpauley• 24 days ago

CA article is just AI;dr on a two week old Verge article: https://www.theverge.com/tech/947157/passports-data-breach-c...

wolvoleo2• 24 days ago

Wow it's insane that Cambridge Analytica is still around after the scandals.

dang5• 23 days ago

Ok, let's use that and put the other two in the toptext.

hhthrowaway1230• 23 days ago

Is this the CA from FB fame? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica? If so how come they still exist?

charles_f6• 23 days ago

Yeah, I almost closed my tab and burnt my browser realizing that.

re• 23 days ago

No, it looks like the domain was taken over by squatters after CA went defunct in 2018, and they're currently using it for AI-generated "content".

ra• 23 days ago

no: https://cambridgeanalytica.org/analyses/what-is-cambridge-an...

dang5• 23 days ago

(The URL above was https://cambridgeanalytica.org/data-breaches-scandals/passpo... for a while but we've since changed it to the original source.)

skilled• 23 days ago

I think the URL should be changed to The Verge link or something else as the current source is repetitive AI writing and incohesive to read.

somenameforme2• 23 days ago

Was about to say the exact same thing. This AI slop is just painful to read. The Verge link ( https://www.theverge.com/tech/947157/passports-data-breach-c... ) should be the default as it seems to be the first party source.

dang5• 23 days ago

Ok, changed above.

siar• 23 days ago

In EU, eIDAS 2.0 will fix all of these issues and future leaks alltogether.

Check authbound.io

ale422• 23 days ago

Looks like this only works on smartphones? Well... no thanks.

lifestyleguru9• 23 days ago

Duh, and only on iOS and Android ones, and only on their latest versions... but don't worry they have good intents I would trust them.

dabber212• 23 days ago

how did you come to this conclusion? its not even true

Edit: if it is only about authbound, maybe. But they are not the only ones offering this service

gempir• 23 days ago

Ironic, using the domain of the British Indian Ocean Territory instead of a .eu domain

stef25• 23 days ago

Back when S3 buckets were rarely protected, I found hundreds of passports of people operating in the diamond business here in Antwerp.

In another one I found all passports that had been scanned by a hostel in Bangkok.

lifestyleguru9• 23 days ago

Ahh so that's what they mean at the reception when they take photo of my ID and say "it's for the police". So that any police anywhere can freely download it at any time!

aand166• 23 days ago

While visiting Italy I've had the hotel photocopy my ID. I've researched and the legal requirement for the hotel is to fill a form on the police website, nothing more. While doing the checkout I've pressed them on the reason for keeping the photocopy ("is it for identity theft? "), the duration they were going to keep the copy etc. Basic info they were bound to disclose because of GDPR _before_ the data processing, which of course never happened.

Turns out the local policemen asked verbally to make photocopies, just in case... The hotel is more afraid of the local police than of it's clients, so they just do it.

Since I was the only client who ever asked about it, and gaslighting me wasn't going to work ("everybody does it! what do you have to hide?"), they just gave me the copy to destroy.

Other places copy IDs because they're lazy and don't want to compile the required form on the spot. Not to mention ID photocopies floating around the reception desk in plain sight...

lifestyleguru9• 23 days ago

Turns out the local policemen asked verbally to make photocopies, just in case... The hotel is more afraid of the local police than of it's clients, so they just do it.

In Italy occasionally they find mafia members hiding for years in... their home regions or even villages. They absolutely keep it "just in case" and I would trust their local police /s.

chrisjj• 22 days ago

Since I was the only client who ever asked about it

Says... this perpetrator?

aand166• 23 days ago

To be able to push back you should know the law requirements for hotels in that jurisdiction, so they can't gaslighting you with fake "it's for police" reasons.

lifestyleguru9• 23 days ago

Ok then. What should I show or say in Spain, Italy, and Croatia?

Usually on plain "I don't consent on making copy, write down the data you need" they become more pushy and even aggressive.

rkagerer• 23 days ago

I have a real problem with the pretense posed by the article that the club has no blame. They should have understood the risk they were taking on by subcontracting a vendor to collect passports, and better vetted that vendor. Obviously the service provider was completely inept, but that doesn't absolve the fools using them.

I preach to my clients this sort of PII should be treated as a toxic, hazardous substance. Ideally don't touch it with a 10 foot pole, and if you can't help it then limit the scope, protect it with strong access policies that severely limit who can touch it (including encryption keys conservatively custodied), and securely delete it all as soon as possible.

Too many companies these days point you to shoddy third parties for some kind of functionality (e.g. book an appointment, perform KYC on you, host the online learning platform for your course, etc.), inappropriately foisting both a new business relationship on you that you never asked for along with their partner's terms of service that you have no bargaining power in negotiating.

This is a side-effect of the SaaS era, and the model is broken.

jwr• 23 days ago

If these kinds of breaches were actually costly, then people would indeed treat PII as toxic. But they aren't. The media brouhaha blows over within a week or so, and things are fine again.

Leaking PII should be very, very expensive, and then this idiocy would stop.

nicbou• 23 days ago

This one is a clear breach of the GDPR. If the Spanish enforcers have any teeth, there will be a hefty fine.

delta_p_delta_x2• 23 days ago

Leaking PII should be very, very expensive

It should be criminal to leak PII, and company leadership should face imprisonment.

Tangurena27• 22 days ago

The Payment Card Industry takes breaches deadly seriously. It is my opinion that any organization that collects PII should be held to the same standard (and penalties) that any organization that collects/processes credit card information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Sec...

NoSalt• 22 days ago

"If these kinds of breaches were actually costly, then people would indeed treat PII as toxic."

But they are costly ... just not to big business or government. They couldn't give two flips about our misery.

mixermachine• 23 days ago

It is quite interesting how this is handled world wide. For me PII is very sensitive and I advice people to be very cautious. Every business in the EU (were I live) also has to be very careful with such data by law. Fines are now at a level were they can hurt the business significantly.

During vacation in an Asian country on the other side all of this was basically a no brainer for smaller to medium businesses. I once rented a scooter there and the business owner had all her documents organised in WhatsApp chats. Including now my passport plus drivers licence... The people in general in that country were also very relaxed when it came to giving out their contact details to random businesses.

I don't want to throw shade on them, thus no country name. Incredible friendly and welcoming people there.

kijin• 23 days ago

WhatsApp probably has better security than random KYC-as-a-service vendors who upload all the documents to a publicly accessible bucket.

cobolcomesback• 22 days ago

The article in the OP is about a company in the EU (the clubs) not taking this seriously by outsourcing their stuff to an Irish company, who also is not taking it seriously. Hell, in the article, the CEO pretty much says “yea we ignored EU law, we will get fined, whatever”.

So I’m not sure the EU law is really working.

BiteCode_dev• 23 days ago

Why would they treat it as toxic?

They don't have a moral code, and they don't pay any price for mistakes.

They have zero incentive.

KellyCriterion• 22 days ago

Processing such PII here with an external AI partner:

- last week, we had bug: I said: "couldnt you just re-run the same step with the same data again" - their answer: "we cant! look at paragraph XY in our GDPR agreement, we are deleting all input documents everything after it has been processed"

Very well implemented! :)

(though, I had to upload and re-initiate eveything again)

xnx• 22 days ago

I preach to my clients this sort of PII should be treated as a toxic, hazardous substance

I've heard this phrasing a lot, but it's hard to believe when there are no consequences after a leak.

deanishe• 21 days ago

the pretense posed by the article that the club has no blame.

Remember that these clubs are mostly small, local businesses. Their owners just don't have the technical sophistication to evaluate software security. Or the clout to demand an audit.

elAhmo• 23 days ago

This should be a wakeup call for data security.

Hah, author is funny.

kleiba2• 23 days ago

I said if before, and I'll say it again: as long as they're is nothing to fear, companies will continue being lax with your valuable private data.

As long as there's no liability, there's no incentive to care.

vaylian• 23 days ago

And they will continue to ask for data, that they don't actually need like phone numbers and home addresses.

w3ll_w3ll_w3ll• 23 days ago

We should stop treating digital pictures of physical documents as some sort of crdentials.

There is a reason why numerous security features are embedded in physical documents like watermarks, holograms and NFC. That's so the authenticity can be inspected in person. A picture has none of those, so it should not be treated as a credential.

mrweasel3• 23 days ago

Different countries handle these things differently, but it's honestly surprising to me that a photo of a passport or drivers license have any value. It provides no security, so why would anyone ever accept it a proof of identity?

notpushkin• 23 days ago

It provides no security, so why would anyone ever accept it a proof of identity?

Because there is no other universal method that works online, and because companies don’t really care about identity verification – they just need something “good enough” so that they can say “hey, we’ve followed industry standard protocols, how could we have known this passport scan was photoshopped?”

And to be honest I think it’s for the best. I really don’t want to be scrutinized even more online (and give even more personal data so it gets leaked a couple years later).

Tangurena27• 22 days ago

We should stop treating digital pictures of physical documents as some sort of credentials.

This is how biometric "authentication" works - you slide a picture (of a face, or maybe a fingerprint or hand geometry) under a door, and the guard on the other side of the door looks at the picture, maybe compares it to some database somewhere and then says PASS/FAIL. Maybe the device taking the picture has some sort of cryptography to prevent yourself from shoving a picture of some authorized person. Usually not.

People keep trying to find the correct magic spell to make biometrics "foolproof". That's a waste of time. Blackhat/DEFCON type conferences were showing people how to make fingerprints out of (the gelatin that makes) gummy bears back in the late 90s. Make them thin enough and you can fool pulse detection (carjackers in some Asian countries were chopping fingers off to bypass theft deterrent systems that used fingerprints).

dabber212• 23 days ago

I will never upload a picture of my passport or id online, ever.

I only recently started IDing myself online via eID (german) if available, before that it was usually that I went to the post office and get verified there

ExoticPearTree2• 23 days ago

It is not an option in every country to do what you do. Thinking of it, its probably a quirk if Germany that you can go to a Post Office to be “verified”.

m00dy• 23 days ago

>But how could the company be so careless?

Generally, these systems are designed by people whose only goal is to make money. Security is just treated as a liability until shit actually hits the fan.

roysting• 23 days ago

That reminds me of the insanity in places like Spain where they want your passport or resident information for every little thing.

We really need to start building a new form of “Democracy” in the backbone of not only that anything that the ruling class wants to apply to everyone else needs to be first implemented on themselves so to double the degree, but that all politicians, bureaucrats, and even contractors need to be bonded against their personal wealth for things they say, promise, contract, or agree to. It is high time that liars, cheats, frauds, and thieves just get to get away with little more than a shoulder shrug and their billions on plunder and lies.

anotheraccount9• 23 days ago

I'm sorry to say this, but most people don't care. Most governments don't care. Companies don't care. Not that it's not important. But protecting people's ID is at the lower part of the list for most organizations. There are hardly any consequences. Leaking PII is still a joke nowadays.

sylware• 23 days ago

IDs fest for scammers and fraudsters.

hephios• 22 days ago

nice for fable 5

tufy1232• 22 days ago

"Let’s hope this is a wakeup call."

Narrator: it was, unfortunately, not a wakeup call...

tufy1232• 22 days ago

Let’s hope this is a wakeup call.

Narrator: it was, unfortunately, not a wakeup call...

One million passports leaked online

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