Police carried out a compulsory investigation over allegations that a so-called "blacklist" containing whether employees joined a labor union was compiled inside Samsung Electronics.
The Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency said at a regular press briefing on the 11th that "we conducted a search and seizure on the 8th in connection with this complaint."
According to police, the Hwaseong Dongtan Police Station sent investigators to Samsung Electronics' Giheung campus on the 8th and executed a seizure warrant on servers that manage in-house work sites and other systems.
Through this, police identified four IP addresses with access records and are said to have pinpointed the users. However, they said it has not yet been determined whether those IP users belong to a union.
Earlier, on the 16th of last month, Samsung Electronics filed a complaint against its employee, identified as A, on suspicion of illegally collecting a large amount of employees' personal information from the company's security system and providing it to a third party. According to Samsung Electronics, A accessed an in-house work site about 20,000 times over roughly one hour to look up employees' personal information, and the activity was detected by the company's abnormal traffic detection system.
However, A is said not to be among the users of the abnormal access record IPs identified through the search and seizure.
Separately from the complaint against A, on the 9th of last month Samsung Electronics filed a police complaint accusing an unidentified individual of violating the Personal Information Protection Act, alleging that a particular employee used other employees' personal information to compile a "blacklist" containing whether they joined a union.
Police said they shifted to a compulsory investigation while examining the connection between the two complaints.
Police plan to continue questioning the subjects as soon as the analysis of the seized materials is completed.