Kakao, which was fined a penalty surcharge of about 15.1 billion won after about 65,000 pieces of personal information were leaked, filed an appeal but lost.
The Seoul Administrative Court's Administrative Division 14 (Chief Judge Lee Sang-deok) on the 15th ruled against the plaintiff in Kakao's suit to cancel the penalty surcharge imposition, corrective order, and other measures issued by the Personal Information Protection Commission.
After media reports in 2023 that KakaoTalk open chat users' personal information was being traded illegally, the Personal Information Protection Commission launched an investigation into whether Kakao violated the Personal Information Protection Act.
The Personal Information Protection Commission later confirmed that Kakao had poorly managed member personal information, resulting in the leakage of about 65,000 cases, and in May 2024 imposed a record penalty surcharge of about 15.1 billion won for violating safety measure obligations.
Kakao filed an administrative lawsuit in November of the same year, arguing that the commission's disposition was unjust.
However, the court found that the commission's imposition of a penalty surcharge was lawful. The court explained, "The open chat databases, combined in forms such as mobile phone numbers, profile names, names of participating open chat rooms, and profiles of the corresponding open chat rooms, being disclosed and sold online constitutes a personal information leak." It added that Kakao's failure to report and notify authorities and users of the leak was unlawful.
The court also pointed out that, given Kakao applied encryption only to newly created open chat rooms as of Aug. 5, 2020, it was a situation in which Kakao recognized, or at least could have recognized, that security risks had materialized or that the risk of a personal information leak had arisen, yet it did not take additional remedial measures afterward.
The court also found that the amount of the penalty surcharge imposed by the commission on Kakao was legitimate, as it strictly followed the calculation standards.