Vice President of IMANI Africa has refuted claims that the Electoral Commission had the automatic right to make public details of electorates.

Kofi Bentil said the laws that allow the Commission to publish the voters roll (in the manner determined by the Commission) also requires the EC to exercise "a careful discretion" in putting out such details.

"It is not true that the Electoral Commission has the automatic right to do this. There is no express authorisation for them to do this.

"The law is clear that they should decide how they are going to put out the data but that decision is also subject to other laws," he said.

His comment follows the release of the voters' roll via an online Google Drive by the Electoral Commission.

The EC, as part of measures to ensure transparency ahead of the December polls, published details of voters including their names, ages, polling centres as well as ID numbers on its website.

The Commission has justified the move and said the decision is in line with clause 3 and 4 of the Public Elections (Registration of Voters) Regulations, 2016 (CI 19), regulation 25.

But Mr Bentil disagrees.

"This has exposed it to a lot of legal questions. The question is 'was it necessary? If you looked at the way the law was couched, it requires the EC to exercise a lot of caution and careful discretion," he said.

He further noted that, any citizen who has his/her details captured on the list, will have a case in course if he/she is able to provide reasonable evidence as to why he does not want his personal details in the public.

"It is quite clear that the EC did not intend to put this out and that that was a mistake and they've had to pull it down. This is enough evidence that they did not exercise enough caution," he added.

On his part, lawyer and Info Security Practitioner Desmond Israel who was also on the show raised concern about the security risks this move poses the public to.

Mr Israel said the EC has exposed citizens to unnecessary data risks including anchoring, identity theft, targets of data theft, among others.

"Ideally, an attacker might spend about a year trying to crap the internet for such an amount of data [of over 17 million people] from various sources but here is the case the EC gave it on a silver platter," he said.

Mr Israel further noted that, this should serve as a wake up call for the data Protection Commission to put in place necessary guidelines to regulate the discharge of such data.

He also urged citizens to exercise maximum caution and vigilance as to how they use the internet henceforth.

"For us on social media it's now time for us to go back to the privacy settings and probably limit the finds," he added.