The company behind South Korean messaging app Kakao Talk on Monday said that it would stop fully cooperating with authorities seeking to access private messages as part of a government crackdown on online criticism.
Lee Sirgoo, chief executive at DaumKakao, which owns Kakao Talk, apologized for its initial handling of privacy issues at a news conference called at short notice by the company.
The government’s recent announcement of stern punishment for what it called “online rumors” prompted many South Koreans to switch from Kakao Talk to foreign messaging services, such as Telegram, an encrypted service headquartered in Berlin.
Lee said the app suffered a loss of users and a decrease in mobile traffic, but declined to say how many users quit its service.
Kakao Talk plans to introduce new privacy features to protect users’ information, he said.
Next year, it plans to begin deleting messages from its servers as soon as they have been read by the intended recipients.
The company said it could face legal sanctions by refusing to cooperate with court-approved warrants.
“When there is no social consensus on the law and privacy, our policy will put privacy first in any case,” Lee said.
It was not immediately clear how Seoul would respond to Kakao Talk’s stance.
South Korean Minister of Justice Hwang Kyo-ahn told legislators that he would look into Kakao Talk’s statement.
Some legal experts said that unless Kakao Talk physically blocks authorities from carrying out warrants, it would not face sanctions.
The company initially said that it would cooperate with authorities and declined to disclose the number of court-approved search requests it received, only to disclose the figures last week after criticism mounted.
During the first half of the year, Kakao Talk received 2,131 requests for users’ information from South Korean authorities with search warrants and cooperated with more than three-quarters of those requests.
Kakao Talk also received 61 court-approved requests during the same period seeking to tap users’ conversations because of government suspicions of certain allegations, such as rebellion or violation of the National Security Law.
The company rejected claims that the warrants were used by authorities to monitor what users said in real time, saying it was not technologically equipped for that.
However, it cooperated with nearly all of the 61 requests by collecting messages that had been stored on its servers for between three and seven days.
Since Tuesday last week, the company has stopped cooperating with authorities with court warrants authorizing wiretapping or collection of stored messages, Lee said.
Lee added that authorities would be hindered in their ability to access messages, as the company has reduced message storage time to three days.
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