Phone calls at all hours of the day from unheard of places has become the norm for citizens of Hyderabad in the run-up to the Lok Sabha Elections. “It is a new number every time, what to report and what not to?” asked 25-year-old P. Nithish, a native of Hyderabad working as an IT employee in Bengaluru. “First, I get a call from Madhya Pradesh. The next time it is a number from Karnataka. Sometimes it is an auto-recorded message telling me which party to vote for, while another time there is an actual person on the other end,” he said.
For about a month and a half, Telangana voters’ phones have been flooded with election-related calls and messages from unknown and unique numbers. While this might look like a regular phenomenon during the election season, the abundance of such messages and calls underlines serious privacy concerns.
