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According to a report by Japan’s public broadcaster NHK, LINE had outsourced its system maintenance since 2018 to a company in Shanghai, which allowed four China-based engineers to access Japanese users’ personal data and information stored on servers in Japan, including users’ names, phone numbers, emails, and even the contents of the communication between users.
The foreign access to Japanese nationals' personal data may have violated Japan’s Personal Information Protection Act, which requires that if a user’s personal information is transferred to a foreign third party, user consent is required.
LINE’s parent company, Z Holdings, stated that four Chinese engineers were involved in the data breach, but it is still investigating whether any data was abused. Z Holdings has also said it will set up a committee within the company to investigate and rectify the situation, according to Japan’s TV Asahi.
“We can’t say yet if Line breached regulations or not, and we are conducting an investigation to find out,” a government official responsible for overseeing privacy regulations told Reuters.
The popular Japanese app currently has more than 194 million users across 230 countries, including 86 million users in Japan and 21 million in Taiwan.
The company has said it changed its data authorizations in late February this year, making it impossible for Chinese engineers to view user information. LINE also stated that it would explain how it manages user personal data more simply in the future.
LINE Taiwan expressed on March 17 that LINE will not cooperate with any government to give them free access to user information, nor will it cooperate with monitoring or censorship.
Regarding privacy, such as user data and message content, LINE Taiwan said that it has never provided any personal information of Taiwan users or users in other countries to the Chinese government. The global user data, including Taiwan users, is stored in servers in Japan and South Korea but not in China. Judging from the current login records, Taiwanese users' personal data has not been exposed to any unauthorized access, the company said.
LINE Taiwan has apologized publicly for the unease and security concerns among its users.
