Regione Toscana has mistakenly shared a real green pass without obscuring the data

The institution's account posted a valid green pass in one of its tweets. It is not the first time, and it also has to do with the lightness with which some photographers sell photos of their certifications online

The tweet of the Tuscany region (image: Twitter) The Tuscany Region has made a media slip compromising privacy of a citizen and publicly disclosing his valid QR code of the green pass to everyone. In these days where green certification has become mandatory throughout Italy, many newspapers, public bodies and institutions are dealing with the subject by showing facsimile photographs of the green pass. The Twitter account of the region, however, created a clarification post on the green certification by putting as an image a mobile phone with the classic QR code which, unlike the others, was a real green pass, which turned out to be belonging to a person.

To highlight the gigantic Tuscan gaffe was the teacher and entrepreneur Matteo GP Flora on Twitter. With a thread he showed how it is not necessary to go into the dark web to buy a counterfeit Green Pass: in this case, at least, it was enough to save the photo published by Regione Toscana.

A further worrying detail, the image in question was not taken by the Tuscany Region, but is available as a stock image on the alamy.com website at a cost of 10 euros. The author of the photograph - as well as the holder of the certificate - turned out to be the professional photographer Paolo Galasso who, regardless of the fact that his document could be used by other people, decided to take a snapshot of it and put it for sale in the photographic archive. .

Flora used the VerificationC19 app to realize that the green pass in the photo was really active and that by publishing that image the privacy of the owner of this document would be violated, and Regione Toscana removed the post only afterwards that the report had begun to circulate online.

This is not the first time this has happened: the same gaffe, to call it that, was also made by the metropolitano.it newspaper, which also published the green pass on Twitter valid for a woman, and from Aeroporti di Roma, who showed another valid green pass; but also by many other photographers who, like Galasso, have auctioned photos of their personal data on Alamy.

Although initially the green pass exhibited by Tuscany seemed to have been revoked and therefore inactive, Wired was able to ascertain that the QR code is still valid.

The green pass is a personal certificate and therefore must not be shared publicly on social networks, nor sold as a stock image on photo archive sites: the risk is even d ' run into identity theft.


Politics - 2 hours ago

What sanctions do those who do not ask for the green pass risk


A German kennel puts cat and dog photos on Tinder for adoption (and it works)


How the green pass works in European Union countries

Topics

Coronavirus Italy Twitter globalData.fldTopic = "Coronavirus, Italy, Twitter"

This opera is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.