Telecom operators offer more user data to authorities

The amount of user telecom data that South Korea’s telecom operators provided to authorities spiked in the second half of last year, coinciding with the presidential election, a report showed.

Local telecom operators provided a total of 425,379 user communications data to police and other state agencies in the latter half of 2012, up 31.2 percent from the preceding six-month period, according to the report by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning.

“The ministry should keep an eye on telecom carriers concerning personal information of users,” said Rep. Min Byung-joo of the ruling Saenuri Party.

Under current laws, state agencies could ask for access to user telecom data including names, personal identification numbers, addresses, phone numbers and dates of registration. The police made 309,822 such requests during the period, followed by the prosecution (84,600 cases), military investigators (24,4768 cases) and the National Intelligence Service (3,549 cases).

As the number of such data requests by Korean authorities has risen, local Web portals earlier said they would not comply with the requests without a warrant issued by court.

By Yoon Ha-youn, Intern reporter,
(yhayoun@heraldcorp.com)