Selangor MB admits use of personal data for insurance scheme as police reports lodged

Selangor Menteri Besar Amirudin Shari has admitted that personal data of voters in the state had been used to enrol them in an insurance scheme managed by a subsidiary of state firm Menteri Besar Inc, as police reports were lodged over fears of a breach of personal data.

Amirudin said the process was a "pre-registration" for the state government's Insurans Hayat Selangor (Insan), adding that the data were made available by the Election Commission.

"The data is public data that can be purchased and is used in pre-registration," he was quoted by Bernama as saying, following outrage on social media over the leakage of private data.

He said the pre-registration was to ease the implementation of the free insurance policy, adding that people may choose to activate their participation by confirming their particulars.

The Insan programme has coverage of up to RM10,000 and is offered to some six million Selangor residents aged between 30 days and 80 years old.

Amirudin, meanwhile, played down claims of a data breach.

"We will tighten controls, especially if there is a breach of data and so on, but this is a pre-registration (process), which means if you do not want to, you do not have to take this policy," he said.

The data breach was first realised when supporters of Pakatan Harapan spread screenshots of personal particulars of pro-opposition social media influencers, in an attempt to show that they had been reaping the benefits from the state government's insurance scheme.

The move backfired when several social media influencers lodged police reports on the use of their personal data without their consent.

One of them is a prominent political commentator, popularly known as YB Viral, who urged Amirudin to explain how personal data had been transferred to a private company.

"We want to know what is going on. We want to know how we can be registered into this insurance programme without our consent using our data and identity card numbers," he said, adding that the certificates of insurance were also made available even though no activation was done.

He said queries by the affected individuals with insurance companies returned with more questions, and they were told that there were no details on their insurance policies.

"We discovered that quite a lot more voters in Selangor had all been registered for this scheme without their consent," he said, adding that lawyers had advised them to lodge police reports.