Sachin Tendulkar commits a blunder on Twitter

What would you do if the great Sachin Tendulkar asks for your phone number? With the drop of a hat, you will send it right away. This is what many followers of the great man on Twitter had done. In a promotional campaign, Tendulkar had tweeted asking for the numbers of people who give excuses for not getting fit.

The agenda of the campaign was that Tendulkar would have spoken to a few people and given them a pep talk as the part of the campaign. Within a few minutes, people started sharing their friend’s number on Sachin’s tweet. They were oblivious to the fact that one should never share their personal details, especially their contact number in an open forum. With the way online spammers and scammers operate with an ounce of data; the fans of Sachin must be worried as the offenders can inflict more damage than just flooding the people with sales calls.

Sachin had posted the tweet on Monday, “Have friends with many excuses to not get fit? Tag them using #NoExcuses with their cities & mobile no & I may call to give them a pep talk!”

Sachin’s fan following in India has been constantly great for more than two decades now. People treat him like a God and venerate him a lot. When a fan wanted to warn a user of not sharing his details, another one dismissed him by saying: “Kuch nahi hoga yaar, bhagwan ne bola jai to karneka.”

Reacting to Sachin Tendulkar’s tweet, Australian web security expert tweeted:

How do you mine troves of phone numbers from Indians? Get a famous cricketer to politely ask people to dox their friends! #NoExcuses https://t.co/PYPCvXdqdr

— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 10, 2017

Would it be too meta if I scraped these numbers off #NoExcuses then paid an Indian call centre to phone and ask for the tweet to be deleted? https://t.co/t2k3fDS8sO

— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 10, 2017

In due time, the post was removed from Tendulkar’s account. But people must realise the significant damage that can happen after they share their details on a public portal. Sachin has more than 17 million followers on Twitter and his post was liked by more than five thousand users. More than 600 people re-tweeted it with 337 people posting a reply before the post was taken down.

This is a privacy disaster. Sharing personal info here (esp mobile numbers) can get you banned. You might land in jail too.

— Kartik Dayanand (@KartikDayanand) July 10, 2017