From a Biz Tribune report dated June 20, 2019.
With prosecutors having indicted the accommodation booking company Goodchoice and its personal data protection officer for violations of the Network Act over the large-scale customer data breach of 2017, the class action brought by those affected at the time has also resumed after seven months.
On the morning of the 20th, the 21st Civil Division of the Seoul Central District Court (presiding judge Sang-hoon Kim) held the ninth hearing in the damages claim.
The plaintiffs are Cho and 311 others; the defendant is With Innovation Co., Ltd., which operates Goodchoice. The amount claimed is KRW 419 million.
The case began when Lee and others commissioned a Korean-Chinese hacker, Nam, to hack the accommodation app "Goodchoice" between March 6 and 17, 2017.
At the time "Goodchoice" had some 2 million users, and 3.42 million items of personal data belonging to 990,000 of them — close to half — were leaked. User names and mobile numbers went out, along with details of their accommodation bookings.
Using the information taken from "Goodchoice," the hackers sent humiliating, sexually explicit text messages to some 4,600 app users, along the lines of "Verification complete, Mr./Ms. so-and-so, did you have a good time?" and "Did you enjoy the motel?"
Cho and the other Goodchoice customers accordingly sued With Innovation Co., Ltd. in June 2017, claiming KRW 419 million in consolation money for the mental harm caused by the leak of the booking and personal information they had provided when signing up.
Law Firm Changchun, which has acted for the plaintiffs throughout, has argued in substance that "the app developer took no safety measures at all despite being required to act technically, so sensitive information about users' sex lives was leaked," and that "it failed to discharge its duty of care as an app developer."