Taipei City Councilor Wang Hong-wei (王鴻薇) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Friday said that excessive use of the instant messaging application Line leaves the Taipei City Government open to security risks.
Wang said that the city government’s internal use of Line groups has exploded under the administration of independent Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), whose use of the service is well-known.
According to statistics provided by the city’s Department of Information Technology, the city government utilizes 181 such groups. The Department of Urban Development leads city departments with 28 groups, while the mayor’s office itself has seven such groups.
Wang said the city’s extensive use of Line groups could potentially expose it to leakage of confidential information, given that anyone within the groups can add new users, enabling anybody to read group discussions.
In addition, Line groups have become a favored venue for hackers to send contaminated Web links, she said.
She said that security concerns have led the Executive Yuan to ban usage of the application, adding that the lack of clear rules covering the preservation of Line records could enable the city government to cover up evidence of wrongdoing.
While the National Archives Act (國家檔案法) specifies how many years ordinary official documents are to be saved, there are currently no similar rules for Line records, she said.
As Line servers are located abroad, there would be no recourse if evidence of wrongdoing was erased, she said.
She urged the Taipei City Government to draft clear rules governing the use of Line application groups while conducting city business and rules requiring Line records to be preserved in a similar manner to ordinary official documents.
City government Internet security concerns were highlighted last week after Ko revealed, under cross-examination by city councilors, that several mayoral office computers had been hacked by an unknown attacker.
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