Line App Allowed Chinese Firm To Access Personal User Data

At a press conference today, the Japanese government said it was investigating the parent company behind the Line instant messaging app after a local newspaper reported that engineers at one of the app's Chinese contractors accessed the messages and personal details of Line users. From a report: According to Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, four Chinese engineers accessed Line's infrastructure and viewed messages and personal information of Line users, such as names, phone numbers, email addresses, and Line IDs. The four engineers worked for a yet-to-be-named Shanghai-based software firm that the LINE Corporation had subcontracted to develop artificial intelligence-based services for the Line application. The four engineers are said to have accessed Line user data on 32 different occasions since August 2018. Most of Line's 86 million userbase is made up of Japanese users, and the Asian country has very strict data and privacy protection regulations.

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