LINE Pay leaks around 133,000 users' data to GitHub, of all places

Smartphone payment provider LINE Pay announced yesterday that around 133,000 users' payment details were mistakenly published on GitHub between September and November of this year. Files detailing participants in a LINE Pay promotional program staged between late December 2020 and April 2021 were accidentally uploaded to the …

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't doubt

that this was a very "sophisticated and advanced" leak.

Lessons will be learned and, oh what the fuck, the usual bullshit apologies, maybe a years of whatever, and all will be well until the next time.

Why are there companies that have "leaks" or (it's not our fault, honest") beaches not taken to the fucking cleaners?

[Ken Y-N]

Local governments in Japan are back using it, though. The 10 million inhabitants of Tokyo can get their vaccine passport through LINE, by just uploading a photo of their paper certificate and a photo ID like a driving licence.

As one of the 10 million, even if I used LINE I wouldn't trust them with that info even before this latest leak.

[Anonymous Coward]

DAIsuki

Those "transactions" are most likely buying and selling of emoji characters. Some "jyoshikosei" (high school aged girls) earn big bucks on the side selling them (50% cut for Line).

I use Line to communicate with my wife, who likes the emoji, which is really just a form of small talk. I 'like' that LINE has developed a medium that manages to engage entirely without resorting to hate (except for a few kawai hate emojis). I don't doubt they sell customer meta info on top of that. HOWEVER, as the above @Ken Y-N post pointed out, it's not safe for any personal info that cannot be expressed in emoji - so it's just the perfect tool for certain use cases.

Unfortunately for LINE, after earlier edging towards profitability (profits of ~60 million in 2016, 2017), they suddenly started losing big - deficits of about half a billion dollars in 2019 and 2020.