Advertisements on websites for groceries, diet pills and cockfights from Vietnam, for one year, on a website of the Romanian Government. SGG explanations

On the official platform data.gov.ro, subordinate to the General Secretariat of the Government (SGG), advertisements for Asian casinos and diet pills appeared for almost a year, and they were only deleted on Wednesday, February 25, after Europa Liberă, the publication that noted the situation, asked for explanations.

Data.gov.ro is, in theory, the platform on which different institutions transmit data sets of public interest, and citizens can ask the state for databases that interest them, but in the last 11 months it has been invaded by bots.

According to Free Europe, hundreds of messages have appeared on this portal promoting prank games or cockfights from Asian platforms, from countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, or private businesses from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Sometimes there were also ads on Western gambling sites.

The SGG reaction

SGG told Free Europe that the problem arose as a result of “abuse of the section (/user page) and account registration mechanism”.

“Registration/publishing functionality associated with users has been misused to generate accounts with promotional names and/or propagate spam content,” SGG claims.

The advertisements “do not represent a form of intentional promotion or tolerance on the part of the institution”, but “an abuse of a public function, which is subject to ongoing technical checks”, the secretariat also declared.

According to the analysis made by Free Europe regarding the “dataset requests” section (data requests) on the government portal, on Wednesday morning there were 472 unresolved requests, but most of them had nothing to do with the interests of Romanian citizens, but with the commercial interests of gambling platforms.

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