Daum to Face Damage Suits for Personal Information Leaks

As damage done by the exposure of the e-mail data of “Hanmail,” the nation’s No. 2 portal Daum’s e-mail service, is snowballing, civic groups and a number of Internet users are set to file lawsuits against Daum.

Kim Jeong-ja, director of Consumers Korea, a non-profit corporation, said Wednesday, “We have formed together with the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice a lawyer group in charge of the Hanmail incident. After conducting a legal review on the matter, we will file an indemnity suit according to the amount of losses.”

The private consumer group said it had received some 150 complaints regarding Daum’s e-mail service disorder as of 3 p.m. Wednesday.

Some complained of the deleting of e-mail contents and the illegal downloading of e-mail attached files.

Hanmail users are expected to suffer the secondary damage stemming from the personal information leak, as some netizens were reportedly harassed by spam mail and unsolicited phone calls.

Members of an Internet café on Naver, another of the nation’s leading Web portals, called “Group to Counteract Hanmail’s Information Leak” said they are also preparing a lawsuit and gathering damage cases.

To these legal moves by netizens, Daum responded, “We are also attempting to figure out the magnitude of the losses, but it will take some time to analyze the exact cause of the incident. The decision to compensate for the losses will be made after completing the analysis.”

According to the Daum user contract, the portal is liable for only the damage caused by intentional or grave errors.

In a separate move, four civic groups, the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice, the National Council of the Green Consumers Network in Korea, Consumers Korea, and the YMCA of Korea, held a press conference on Wednesday to announce their intention to lodge a consumer collective suit against Hanaro Telecom for proving third parties with clients’ personal information without consent. They are expected to file the lawsuit with the Seoul Central District Court Thursday.

Consumer collective litigation refers to a legal contest initiated by consumer groups to ask a court to prohibit or stop businesses’ illegal acts that infringe upon consumers’ physical and property interests.