Japan's government has ordered local tech giants LINE and NAVER to dismantle their technology stacks, after a data breach saw the data of over 510,000 users exposed.
What is LINE | Japan's largest platform
LINE is a messaging app created by an offshoot of South Korea's NAVER – a Google-like web giant. The LINE app is widely used in Asia – in Japan and Thailand it is used by the majority of the population and enjoys the kind of ubiquity that WhatsApp has in other countries. In 2021, LINE merged with Yahoo! Japan, which is owned by SoftBank. NAVER and SoftBank emerged as half-owners of a unit that operates LINE.
In 2023, however, LINE leaked. And on Tuesday, Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications issued administrative guidance on how to avoid a similar disadvantage in the future.
The ministry's guidance details deep entanglements between LINE and NAVER tech. NAVER's cloud has "comprehensive access" to LINE's environment, making it easy to access data stored in the messaging app's legacy system using NAVER's network.
