People should Avoid Publishing NIK, KK Numbers into Social Media

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Home Affairs Ministry's Population and Civil Registration Director General Zudan Arif Fakrulloh warned members of the public to think twice before uploading sensitive and private records to the internet.

Zudan reasons that that was one of the factors driving the misuse of citizenship identity (NIK) and family card (KK) numbers in the recent mandatory prepaid SIM card registration.

“Be extra cautious uploading private documents to social media. Existentialists like these need to be reduced,” said Zudan in the ‘Forum Merdeka Barat 9’ discussion on Wednesday, March 14.

According to Zudan, people’s private data regarding population is already widely spread from events such as credit card registrations, opening a bank account, or renting a hotel room. He also said that there are hundreds of thousands of identity card (KTP) photos that can be easily obtained through a simple Google search.

Tempo proved Zudan’s claims by entering the keyword “KTP” into the Google image search. The results were astonishing with many photos of ID cards that are complete with its ID number (NIK), the person’s photo, and signature.

Despite that, Zudan assured that the NIK and KK numbers used in the SIM card mandatory government registration are safely kept at the Home Affairs Ministry's Population and Civil Registration Directorate that are protected by layers of security measures.

“The data center security measure is layer upon layer. There are three layers of fingerprint identification device which must be passed. The internet network that we use to send the data are unique VPNs,” said Zudan.

ADAM PRIREZA