Mar 18 (Nikkei) - Technicians at a Chinese company affiliated with the Japanese provider of the Line chat app had access to personal information of users in Japan.
Line Corp. made inadequate disclosures on foreign access to data in its privacy policy. The company has reported the incident to the Personal Information Protection Commission here and said it had already moved to end the Chinese affiliate's access. A third-party committee will soon be set up to investigate, according to a news release by Line on Wednesday.
The affiliate, Line Digital Technology (Shanghai), had four employees who could access user data from a server in Japan since August 2018. The data included names, phone numbers and identification numbers, as well as some messages that were reported by users to Line as inappropriate content. Line said the affiliate was given access to the extent required to perform its job. Line also said it did not know of any unauthorized access at this time.
However, Line said it had already denied Line Digital Technology (Shanghai) permission to access some data between February and March, to "further raise the security level."
Line has around 86 million users in Japan, making it a major component of people's online lives.
Line's privacy policy states that personal data may be transferred to a third country. But it does not mention the possibility of overseas affiliates accessing such data.
In addition, there was not sufficient explanation about the work of foreign companies in monitoring the contents of the profile screen and its bulletin board function, called open chat. Line outsourced the monitoring to a domestic contractor, but it subcontracted the work to a company in Dalian, China.
Source: ANNnewsCH
