Today it was reported that 2,078 customers of Auction(the “Company”), the largest on-line shopping mall which has almost 18,000,000 people as its registered users, filed a lawsuit against the Company alleging it accidentally had leaked millions of files containing personal information about its customers.

Previously on February, the Company announced its sever had been hacked by allegedly a Chinese hacker.  However the Company has not cleared up to what extent personal information had been leaked by the accident.  Not satisfied by the Company’s handling, the customers jumped into a lawsuit.  The plaintiffs are seeking 2,000,000won(approximately 2,000 US dollars) per person.

There has been several internet personal information leakage cases.  For example, Kookmin bank, one of leading banks of Korea, was sued last year on personal information leakage accident and ordered to pay 200,000won(approximately 200 US dollars) per plaintiff by the court.

You can read the news article here.

© 2008 Wonil Chung, a Korean IT Lawyer/Chung & Partners, a Korean IT Law Firm.  All rights reserved. Some copyrights, photos, icons, trademarks, trade dress, or other commercial symbols that appear on this post are the property of the respective owners.