from Hacker News

Database containing personal info of 106M visitors to Thailand exposed online

by zachberger on 9/21/21, 9:06 AM with 48 comments

• by blunte on 9/21/21, 12:33 PM

  I guess I'm in there too. But passports get copied and provided to so many institutions these days that I wouldn't even consider nationality and passport number as private.

  Now, if someone is traveling to Thailand to partake of some of the more controversial options, then I can see how this would be damaging.

  We should all do our best to maintain privacy, but at the same time we should understand that the concept of privacy is changing. And by that I mean that we have less - and will have even less in the future - privacy than people did 10+ years ago.

  It won't be long before biometric and other personally identifiable scanners will be integrated into much of what we touch or where we go. It may not be publicly known or even legal, but it will (and probably already does) happen. Just look at the NFC and facial recognition systems in much of our shopping places...

• by yabones on 9/21/21, 1:06 PM

  Of course it's elasticsearch. Elastic did irreparable damage by paywalling authentication and TLS on a supposedly open source project. If you make security optional, you've created an insecure and unsafe product.

• by TekMol on 9/21/21, 10:26 AM

  What dangers are associated with this type of data becoming public?

  I can imagine burglars using this info to decide which houses and apartments to rob.

  Anything else that comes to mind?

  Any first / second hand experiences of what can happen if private data like this becomes public?

• by zachberger on 9/21/21, 9:32 AM

  I visited Thailand about six times in the last four years so this is a bit concerning to me. I really wish there were more details and hope that I can find out if my data was exposed as a part of this.

• by patchtopic on 9/21/21, 10:52 AM

  thanks for nothing incompetent Thai gov!

  - someone who has been to Thailand frequently pre covid.

• by m0zg on 10/2/21, 2:24 AM

  Would be fun to query that DB for men traveling to Thailand alone several times per year.