Following a hacking incident last year at Line Yahoo, the operator of Japan’s national messenger “Line,” the company requested that South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) investigate Naver. This request comes after the Japanese government had already issued two rounds of administrative guidance to Line Yahoo. The parent company, A Holdings, is co-owned equally by Naver and Japan’s SoftBank. The Japanese government is intensifying pressure, including demanding that Naver sell its shares and calling for further investigation into the hacking incident, in an effort to reduce Naver’s influence in Line Yahoo.
According to IT industry sources and the PIPC on May 1, the Japanese government sent an email last month to the PIPC, requesting an investigation into Naver regarding a personal information leak at Line Yahoo, managed by Naver. “It’s unusual for the Japanese government to request an investigation nearly six months after the hacking incident and after necessary measures have been taken,” said an IT industry insider. “The pressure is increasing, especially since the government had already signaled through administrative guidance for Naver to disengage from managing Line Yahoo.”
The Japanese government is pressuring Naver, a company from its ally South Korea, due to the influence of the Line messenger, which holds over a 70% market share in Japan. It is speculated that the Japanese government is concerned about Naver, a South Korean company, using information from Japanese users of Line. Under this pressure, Line Yahoo is showing signs of severing its existing collaborative relationships with Naver, including in security systems.
The Japanese government reportedly sent an email to the PIPC asking it to “check whether Naver and others have properly managed personal information related to Line Yahoo in South Korea.” It is considered unusual for the Japanese government to request further investigation after the Korean government had already completed its own.
