Hyderabad: With the websites of Telangana police not functioning, people are left confused with no clarity as to how to go about the procedures, leading to most citizens ranting about their distress on reddit.com.One redditor indignantly posted, “This is limits now. We do not have even official police station websites where we could get information about police stations, officers posted in them, phone numbers of each and every police Sls, beats for every police commissionarate. I am surprised after this government came to power they abolished that website. I used to show my other states’ friends how modern Hyderabad policing is. It used to be very helpful.” Another user responded to the post, saying, “Lawyer here, I think they pulled it down due to hack threats as other websites and data got compromised.” It is worth noting that the Telangana police’s safety app, ‘Hawkeye’ was hacked, risking the personal data of lakhs of users. The hack was discovered on May 29. However, a week later, another police app, ‘TSCOP’, was hacked, making the personal data of police officers public. However, a month on, most of the Telangana police websites remain unreachable. Moreover, while the URLs for Hyderabad and Cyberabad police show unreachable, the Rachakonda police website’s URL has gone invisible in the search engine. When contacted, ADGP for the Cybersecurity Bureau of Telangana, Shikha Goel, said, “We have been performing security checks as and when required and have been updating the same to the tech department. The tech branch is trying to make sure that this issue is resolved as soon as possible. Ever since the new laws came into force, the tech branch is trying to make sure that the platforms are ready to cater for the provisions of the new laws, especially the ones concerning the general public.” While some of the websites are now operational, not all the data on those websites are updated. For example, the website www.hyderabad.telangana.gov.in is operational; most of the contact numbers of Circle Inspectors of various police stations have not been updated. Almost all the numbers start with ‘94906’, while the updated numbers for the police department are supposed to start with ‘871266’. While for some, platform X might be of some help, where SHOs provide their contact numbers in their profile bios, in most cases, those aren’t updated either.
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