The National Privacy Commission (NPC) announced on Wednesday that it’s investigating a website that associated itself with the Land Transportation Office (LTO) in order to determine possible breach of personal information of LTO-registered motorists.
The NPC said that by simply providing the motor vehicle file number, the lisensya.info‘s “Motor Vehicle Authenticator” feature will generate the car make, plate, engine and chassis number as well as the registration expiry and the name of the car owner.
The NPC said that some netizens claimed that the data that the questionable site provides were accurate, “raising suspicions of a leak in LTO’s database as these are the types of information the LTO collects from motorists for registration.”
As of November 11, the site remains accessible while the LTO-run website “lto.net.ph,” which provides the status of the availability of license plates, is down or unavailable. The privacy commission said that based on its initial investigation, lisenysa.info has neither a privacy notice nor any contact details of its owner.
The LTO previously issued a statement, warning motorists that the website is not under the agency.
In a statement, Privacy Commissioner Raymund E. Liboro said that the “NPC shall verify the incident and look into the extent of possible harm on LTO’s data subjects to determine how to best resolve the situation.”
“NPC is coordinating with the Data Protection Officer (DPO) of the LTO for us to be provided with more details of the incident,” Liboro said. He noted that the DPO of the agency has just filed its initial breach notification report with the NPC yesterday, November 10, 2020.
The NPC said that a total of 12.725 million vehicles were registered with the LTO in 2019.