Seoul, Feb 12 (IANS) South Korea’s privacy watchdog said on Thursday it has fined the Korean units of luxury brands Louis Vuitton, Dior and Tiffany a combined 36 billion won ($24.9 million) over leaks of customer information.
The Personal Information Protection Commission made the decision in a plenary meeting the previous day, imposing on Louis Vuitton Korea a fine of 21.4 billion won — the heaviest among the three companies — over a data breach of about 3.6 million customers, reports Yonhap news agency.
The watchdog said an outside actor stole personal information, such as user names, phone numbers and birth dates, over three occasions by hacking into an employee device. It noted the company had poor security practices for remote logins.
Meanwhile, the regulator fined Christian Dior Couture Korea and Tiffany Korea 12.2 billion won and 2.4 billion won, respectively, for data breaches after employees were tricked into granting internal system access to malicious actors.
Dior suffered a data breach of about 1.95 million users and was unaware of the incident for three months, while the leak at Tiffany involved the personal information of around 4,600 users, according to the watchdog.
The leaked user data from both companies included names and email addresses.
Separately, the watchdog fined BKR, which operates Burger King in South Korea, 924 million for collecting the personal data of minors aged 13 or under without guardian consent.
It imposed a fine of 642 million won on MGC Global, which operates popular coffee franchise Mega MGC Coffee, for sending marketing messages to customers who did not consent to receiving them.
The regulator also fined eight other food and beverage companies for violations of the personal information protection law, said the report.
Meanwhile, South Korea’s financial regulator said on Thursday it plans to strengthen de-listing rules to speed up the exit of companies that fail to meet necessary requirements.
The move comes as part of efforts to improve the smaller KOSDAQ market and accelerate the country’s transition to productive finance, and also facilitate innovative ventures and startup businesses, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) said.
Starting July 1, companies whose market capitalisation is below 20 billion won (US$13.8 million) will be exited from the KOSDAQ market. The threshold will be raised to 30 billion won at the start of next year.
—IANS
na/