Police booked six people for selling personal information of about 2 million visitors to social networking site ``Cyworld.''
According to the Seoul Police Agency, last October they created a program that traces visitors to personal blogs on Cyworld and sent text messages or mail to about 16,000 users saying that they could check who visited their Web spaces for 10,000 won.
The tracing program provides the names, IP addresses and visit time of users. However, social identification and phone numbers along with other sensitive personal information have not been leaked, police said.
The individuals installed the program on each blog in order to extract visitors' basic information, then saved the relevant data in a separate database.
I wonder if there will be any fall-out. Last year Google was in trouble for exposing Korean resident ID numbers, with people using this "flaw" as another reason to hate on the foreign competitor. However, as Stafford at The Chosun Bimbo points out, the fault should lie not with google for finding the information, but for users themselves putting this sensitive information on webpages and documents to begin with.
1 comment:
And the online banking systems here are as convoluted as a Swiss Account. You have to get security codes from the branch just to log onto your accounts? How many instances of online banking fraud happens in the US compared to the number of people using standard 128bit password encryption. The Korean banking system is seriously fucking flawed -- a pain to use, inconsistent application of the law and ATMs that actually have business hours? WTF. The Korean "concern" for online security is very misplaced.. The irony is that most sites are designed around the seriously flawed IE.. yet there doesn't seem to be any concern about using Windows or IE.. Yet, me, on a very secure Mac, I can't even access my bank accounts online. Pffft. I wish the Korean bureaucracy would grow the fuck up.
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