The Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) made an epic comeback after a user of its official ticket booking application complained of obscene advertisements on the app.
The IRCTC app user, named Anand Kumar, tweeted to IRCTC's official account, tagging Railway Minister Piyush Goyal, that he was seeing obscene ads on the IRCTC app and even attached screenshots of the advertisements visible on his mobile screen.
"Obscene and vulgar ads are very frequently appearing on the IRCTC ticket booking app. This is very embarrassing and irritating @RailMinIndia @IRCTCofficial @PiyushGoyalOffc kindly look into it," he tweeted.
Obscene and vulgar ads are very frequently appearing on the IRCTC ticket booking app. This is very embarrassing and irritating @RailMinIndia @IRCTCofficial @PiyushGoyalOffc kindly look into. pic.twitter.com/nb3BmbztUt
— Anand Kumar (@anandk2012) May 29, 2019
The IRCTC's official customer support account, Indian Railways Seva, told Anand Kumar that the ads were based on cookies and asked the user to clear his own browsing history.
Irctc uses Googles ad serving tool ADX for serving ads.These ads uses cookies to target the user. Based on user history and browsing behaviour ads are shown. Pl clean and delete all browser cookies and history to avoid such ads.
— Indian Railways Seva (@RailwaySeva) May 29, 2019
-IRCTC Official
Soon after IRCTC's response on Twitter, social media flooded with memes, trolling the user.
Megha Kaveri tweeted, "When IRCTC burns you like there is no tomorrow."
However, web developer named Gagandeep S Luthra said that the IRCTC's HTML code shows Javascript loaded from a push notification platform, which is not strictly monitored and one can send any link.
"A look at the irctc html code shows Javascript Loaded from http://izooto.com, which is a Push Notification Platform. Push Notifications are not strictly monitored and one can send any vulgar link endlessly using that. I was surprised to see its use on irctc," Luthra tweeted, attaching the screenshot of the HTML codes.
