Petition to make lee kuan yew day a public holiday tainted by data mining

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

PETITION TO MAKE LEE KUAN YEW DAY A PUBLIC HOLIDAY ACCUSED OF DATA MINING

Post date:
1 Apr 2015 - 8:51pm








Two websites popped up over the weekend calling on Singaporeans to sign a petition to make March 23rd a public holiday. However, the websites have been accused by netizens of being used to mine people's personal data.

Instead of using popular petition portals such as change.org, the organisers of this petiiton had created two new websites to collect signatures.

The websites, lkyday.com and 1923-2015.com required members of the public to give their names, email addresses, contact numbers and NRIC numbers.

At least one person made public their concerns about the websites, writing a public letter to warn others to be careful and to report the website. Clearly, some people really did report the websites to the hosting providers as the two websites were taken down on Wednesday morning but lkyday.com came back up by the afternoon.

It is understood that the websites were started by Dr John Lim, the President of the Academy of Certified Counsellors. Dr Lim explained to the media that lkyday.com was set up as the other one was perhaps too hard to remember.

He explained that complaints made to the domain host resulted in a freeze on the websites due to privacy concerns but he was working with the domain providers to get the websites back up.

The NRIC number was just to ensure that all signatories were Singapore citizens or PRs, Dr Lim explained. This was done in order to make the petition strong so that the authorities knew that the petition was real and concrete as NRIC numbers can't really be faked as easily as names and contact numbers. The petition is going to be submitted to MOM and the Minister once it receives enough signatures.

The website also outlines in the privacy policy that the details collected will not be sold, exchanged, transferred or given to any company for any reason, except for the purpose of the petition, without the users' consent.
Dr Lim also explained that it was a new website but it received a lot of traffic within the first day of setting up and this caused some red flags to be raised by the host.

Shockingly, the website being taken down wasn't the only negative thing that happened. Dr Lim's wife received a death threat by email and this email was also sent to multiple others.
Explaining what happened on their facebook page, they wrote:







Latest Update.
1) we noted that when there was a whatsapp msg that was sent to many, which was forwarded to us from our friends, there were invalid update at our website. We carried out necessary maintenance.
2) The following email was sent to contactprivacy.com and it triggered a concern over our sites.
Please take a look who has sent that email.
We are working with our hosting agent for our domain to get the site up.
We have also filed a police report ref: G/20150401/7006.
We thank you for your support and patience.
Despite these hiccups, the petition has already collected over 17,000 signatures.
Here is what the website says about the purpose of the petition:
We are thankful to our Founding Father and the first Prime Minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew.
When he fought to be our leader, no one would have imagined how strong his determination was to ensure success in this nation.
His love for his country and his sense of responsibility for the well-being of the people of Singapore has made us proud.
We are so blessed that we did not just have a leader who was for us, but we have a honorable statesman who never gave up his missions.
We would like to put forward a petition to the government of Singapore to declare 23 March a gazetted public holiday to commemorate Mr Lee Kuan Yew so that all generations would know and ask about him.
Singapore's success did not come easy and may there be capable men and women of character and integrity who would catch his passion and vision, and step forward to serve the residents of Singapore as he did.
You can sign the petition here: http://lkyday.com/


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