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The number of warrants issued by courts to confiscate user data from South Korea's top mobile messenger declined sharply in the first half of this year, a report showed Tuesday, following criticism of covert cyber surveillance by law enforcement authorities.
Daum Kakao Corp., the operator of KakaoTalk, received 1,449 court orders in the January-June period to submit users' private information to the prosecution for investigative purposes, down 32 percent from the previous year, the company said in the latest transparency report.
The figure from six months earlier was 1,733, the report said.
The number of court orders for users of Daum, the web portal run by the IT firm, remained almost steady at 2,520 as of end-June, compared with 2,595 a year ago.
Daum Kakao provides separate statistics for its search engine and mobile chatting service because it is a merged firm from the two namesake ventures that combined less than a year ago.
Of the requests, the company processed 71 percent for the KakaoTalk accounts and 75 percent for Daum data, it added.
The considerable fall in the number of court warrants is seen by market watchers as a consequence of growing public awareness of protecting personal information after it was revealed last year that IT firms had been providing the prosecution with private data without the users' knowledge.
The revelation by a lawmaker has sparked public ire and calls for the country's top two IT giants -- Daum Kakao and Naver Corp.-- to disclose details on the records of their compliance with such requests, leading to their first publication in January.
However, both companies have refused to hand over users' identification details such as names, resident registration numbers and phone numbers since 2013, after the Supreme Court ruled in late
2012 that firms are not obligated to provide such data to investigative bodies.
The data that they did let the authorities get their hands on included wiretapping access to emails or messages of possible criminal suspects, or their sign-in logs and IP addresses, the report said.
There were 23 wiretapping requests for Daum accounts, with none for KakaoTalk users in the first half, it said.
The company also received nearly 3,000 requests to forward log records and IP addresses, of which only about half was processed, it said. (Yonhap)
Daum Kakao Corp., the operator of KakaoTalk, received 1,449 court orders in the January-June period to submit users' private information to the prosecution for investigative purposes, down 32 percent from the previous year, the company said in the latest transparency report.
The figure from six months earlier was 1,733, the report said.
The number of court orders for users of Daum, the web portal run by the IT firm, remained almost steady at 2,520 as of end-June, compared with 2,595 a year ago.
Daum Kakao provides separate statistics for its search engine and mobile chatting service because it is a merged firm from the two namesake ventures that combined less than a year ago.
Of the requests, the company processed 71 percent for the KakaoTalk accounts and 75 percent for Daum data, it added.
The considerable fall in the number of court warrants is seen by market watchers as a consequence of growing public awareness of protecting personal information after it was revealed last year that IT firms had been providing the prosecution with private data without the users' knowledge.
The revelation by a lawmaker has sparked public ire and calls for the country's top two IT giants -- Daum Kakao and Naver Corp.-- to disclose details on the records of their compliance with such requests, leading to their first publication in January.
However, both companies have refused to hand over users' identification details such as names, resident registration numbers and phone numbers since 2013, after the Supreme Court ruled in late
2012 that firms are not obligated to provide such data to investigative bodies.
The data that they did let the authorities get their hands on included wiretapping access to emails or messages of possible criminal suspects, or their sign-in logs and IP addresses, the report said.
There were 23 wiretapping requests for Daum accounts, with none for KakaoTalk users in the first half, it said.
The company also received nearly 3,000 requests to forward log records and IP addresses, of which only about half was processed, it said. (Yonhap)
