South Korea's Korea Communications Standards Commission on Broadcasting, Media and Telecommunications has asked Google to delete personal information about victims of digital sex crimes that was exposed to an outside institution, and has begun a joint response with international organizations.
The commission said on the 13th that it had worked with the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family to request that Google remove the posts and search results containing the exposed victim information, and that it had conducted an emergency review. Names, ages, workplaces, schools and mobile phone numbers of digital sex crime victims, along with details of the offenses, had been submitted to Google to have the illegal footage taken down. Those details were found to be exposed on a project website run by a research institute affiliated with Harvard Law School in the United States. A total of 42 cases were exposed, including 16 for which access had been blocked after a prior removal request among the review applications filed by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. The name of the Central Digital Sex Crime Victim Support Center was also disclosed.
The commission demanded that the website in question and Google delete the relevant posts and search results. It also shared the matter with three international organizations — the International Association of Internet Hotlines (INHOPE), the Global Online Safety Regulators Network (GOSRN) and the International Institute of Communications (IIC) — as well as the U.S. National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), and requested their cooperation. The commission also urged overseas operators including Google, Meta Korea, X Korea and TikTok Korea, along with Cloudflare, to put in place systems to manage and protect information so that sensitive victim data is not shared or circulated externally.
