In the article, it was stated that Odex had no right to catch, pursue, fine or even obtain the names of the alleged downloaders.

I am not alarmed that Odex failed because it was clear from the start that Odex was neither a copyright holder nor exclusive licensee and thus was unauthorised.

I am, however, concerned that an unauthorised organisation such as Odex can easily obtain the names of customers from the two local Internet Service Providers, SingNet and StarHub.

What is even more disturbing is that these two ISPs gave out the sensitive data without putting up a fight or even finding out if Odex was truly an authorised party. This resulted in sensitive customer information falling into the wrong hands.

It was ironic and embarrassing when a foreign ISP, Pacific Internet, became the only ISP to seriously protect its customers' information. However, thankfully for its efforts, Singaporeans were given the chance to confirm that Odex had never been legally authorised and its claims were all untrue.

The Odex fiasco has demonstrated that our personal information is highly vulnerable to leakage to unauthorised parties anytime due to the lack of laws protecting our information.

Our Government should not treat our citizens' information lightly, lest we make the same mistakes that Britain made last year, which exposed a staggering 25 million customer accounts to identity theft.

Hence, I strongly feel that the Government needs to set up stringent laws that will better safeguard our sensitive information.

Chen Liang