South Korea has fined Chinese e-commerce giant ‘Temu’ approximately one million dollars for transferring personal information of Korean users to china, illegally.
Temu which has risen among other Chinese platforms such as Shein, and AliExpress — recently gained global popularity as it offers variety of products at low prices.
However, according to South Korea’s Data Protection watchdog on Thursday, Temu has been illegally transferring personal information of its users in south Korea.
In the report by Seoul’s Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), Temu usually outsources and stores users’ data with companies in several countries, including China, Singapore, South Korea and Japan.
Meanwhile, the company never disclosed any such possibility in its privacy policy nor notified users —they never also inspected oversea companies to make sure they were handling personal data well enough.
Due to this, PIPC has disclosed that it has fined the company about 1.39 billion won (US$997,624) for violating the data protection act.
“As of 2023, an average of 2.9 million users in South Korea were using Temu daily, but the company did not designate a local representative as required by South Korean data protection law.
“Temu also complicated the account deletion process with seven steps, making it difficult for users to exercise their right,” the report says.
Meanwhile, last year, in 2024, South Korea had also fined AliExpress(another Chinese e-commerce company); up to 1.98 billion won for transferring the personal information of Korean Users overseas, illegally.
Even Meta would not be left out on the lash out as it was fined 21.6 billion won, the same last year; for illegally harvesting sensitive users’ data. Sexual orientation would not be left out in Meta’s case as nearly a million South Korean Facebook users fell victims and those were shared with advertisers.
Now, on Thursday, Temu has joined as South Korea would fine it up to 1 million dollars for not protecting the privacy of users from there.
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