Line Comes Under Scrutiny After Chinese Engineers Reportedly Accessed User Data

The popular messaging app Line is now under investigation by the Japanese government after local media reported that it allowed Chinese engineers at a Shanghai company to access Japanese users’ data without telling them.

According to the report by Reuters, a government official has stated that investigations were ongoing and that they are unable to tell if Line violated any regulations yet. At the same time, a spokesperson from Line denied that the firm broke any laws or regulations.

But on its website, the company later apologised for causing any concern and for inadequately explaining its data management policies to users, adding that no inappropriate access took place.

Local media has reported that four Chinese engineers, tasked with system maintenance, were given access to Japanese servers from 2018 containing names, telephone numbers, and email addresses of users.

The alarm over the incident probably stems from Japan’s often choppy relations and historical unease with China. It doesn’t help that China-backed hackers were blamed for a recent massive breach of Microsoft Exchange email servers.

For what it’s worth, China has acquired a reputation for spying and hacking in the last few years.

Accordingly, researchers at Stanford University last month raised concern over social media app Clubhouse’s affiliation with Shanghai-based company Agora. Also, last month, TikTok settled a privacy lawsuit alleging that it sent user data to Chinese servers or certain locations in which China-based employees could access the data.

Beijing may not like it, but the very mention of China raises suspicion these days.

Nurflix’s User Data Temporarily Appeared On Google Search

First introduced in July last year, Nurflix is a local streaming service that is focused on Islamic contents and is apparently the first of such service in Malaysia that is said to be Syariah-compliant. After being in the trial period for the past few months, the service has begun to offer paid subscription to customers earlier this month.

It has recently been discovered that some of Nurflix’s user accounts could be found through Google Search. As discovered by Amanz, among the information that was revealed through the search engine includes user names and e-mail addresses:

Clicking on these Nurflix accounts that were shown on Google Search would not reveal further information about them though as one still requires a password in order to access them. In general, it is possible that the admins of Nurflix may have overlooked their settings and have allowed Google to index some areas of its website that should be off-limits to the public.

If that sounds familiar to you, that is because it has happened to WhatsApp several times before. Meanwhile, it seems that Nurflix has managed to quickly fix the issue as when we ran the search keyword once again tonight, we were provided with a different result altogether.

However, the fix was done rather quietly though as the company didn’t issue any official statement regarding the matter through any of its social media channels until now.