Chennai: The names of 1.4 crore people in the state who hadn’t taken the second Covid-19 vaccination were available for public view on https://tndphpm.com/ until Friday.
Officials said the names of people from 46 health units containing 388 blocks along with type of vaccine, date and site of vaccination, beneficiary identity, beneficiary type (healthcare/frontline worker) and in some cases even mobile numbers were published “inadvertently” on google spreadsheets.
Immunization wing officials said they downloaded the data from the Cowin portal to create a line list of people. The objective was to plan for awareness camps and vaccination drives in closer areas where there are wide gaps.
The details of people in all health units were downloaded and collated. But the data was meant for select public health department officials. While it is unclear how many days the data was available on the webpage for public access, some said it was a breach of personal information.
Posting the link to the webpage on Twitter, one user said that the entire data was editable with “full control” over each document.
Director of public health Dr T S Selvavinayagam said, “The document was inadvertently uploaded in the public domain. It will be removed immediately. There was no intention to shame or humiliate people or violate privacy.”
