‘Digital Laundry’ Services Seek to Offer Koreans Clean Slate Online
When Kim Ho-jin first expanded his model and talent agency to offer an online content-deletion service, his motivation was simple: protect clients who were suffering from Internet overexposure.
After witnessing models from his company, Santacruise Casting Co., struggle for years to overcome malicious rumors and inaccurate information about them on the Internet, he decided to help them by asking Naver Corp. 035420.SE - 1.52%, Google Inc. GOOGL - 0.86% and other search engines to remove nasty content found under the models’ names. The requests often worked, and soon others sought Mr. Kim’s help.
Eighteen months into the new business, revenue from data-removal requests accounts for more than half of his 20-year-old company’s sales, and that portion keeps growing. “In the beginning, our main clients were celebrities and entertainers. But now it’s the ordinary people and business leaders that constitute the bulk of our revenues,” he said.
Internet-savvy entrepreneurs have taken stock of Santacruise’s success and are racing to offer similar services, known in South Korea as “digital laundry.”
At least seven domestic digital launderers, including Skipper Inc., have sprung up in the past year, seeking to help people erase online content and remove links to personal information that is old, irrelevant or inappropriate. Critics worry that the businesses could lead to a digital whitewashing for people who can pay for it, but privacy advocates say that such services are long overdue for those struggling to regain their online privacy.
Revenue from the digital-laundry businesses mainly comes from commission fees for tracking down unsavory content on clients through Internet portals and websites and then filing removal requests with the Web operators. In some cases, if a website rejects a request for removal, a digital launderer will take legal action. Mr. Kim said Santacruise is handling about 10 such cases in court.
But in the majority of cases, Mr. Kim says, websites honor removal requests. He said his company’s success rate is more than 90%.
Mr. Kim said his company’s client fees range from 500,000 won to three million won, or about $470 to $2,800, for the successful removal of material as well as two or three months of follow-up to make sure the unwanted information doesn’t resurface.
For celebrities or corporate clients, the fees can be significantly higher and the digital laundering can be a much more lengthy process, with high-profile clients signing contracts of as much as 150 million won to 200 million won, or about $140,000 to $190,000, a year.
Mr. Kim and representatives from other digital-laundry companies said requests for personal-data removal in South Korea have increased since a European Union court in May established a “right to be forgotten.” The ruling granted Europeans a right to demand the erasure of links to information about them that is outdated or inappropriate.
Google, which handles about 90% of searches in Europe, received tens of thousands of requests after the ruling, prompting the search engine to remove the links deemed inappropriate.
“The ruling applies to only European citizens and search-engine operators in Europe,” said Park Young-woo, an official at Korea Internet & Security Agency. “We, at the government level, haven’t asked Google to take the same or similar action in Korea.”
Privacy officials from other Asian-Pacific countries have also said the ruling doesn’t apply outside of Europe, but the case has drawn heightened attention to the issue.
Allan Chiang, Hong Kong’s privacy commissioner for personal data, called the ruling one of the hottest recent topics in global privacy but added that the right to privacy online has limits. “There could be legitimate reasons to keep data in a database, for example, the archives of a newspaper,” he wrote on his commissioner’s blog recently.
Timothy Pilgrim, Australia’s privacy commissioner, said Canberra is monitoring online privacy issues after the EU ruling, but Australian privacy-law experts have said there is little political will to strengthen online-privacy laws in the country.
Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said the government doesn’t have pending legislation on the right to be forgotten.
Meanwhile, the Korea Communications Commission, South Korea’s top telecommunications and Internet regulator, has created a task force to review the need to enact legislation aimed at making it easier for the country’s citizens to request that their personal information be removed from Internet search results.
Currently, Internet portal and search-engine operators act on requests for data removal or content deletion only when they deem that the person who is the subject of a removal request actually suffers from severe privacy infringement or defamation.
Content-removal requests filed with South Korea’s three Web portal companies, Naver, Nate and Daum Communications Corp. 035720.KQ +0. 41%, more than quadrupled to 374,976 cases last year from 92,638 in 2008, according to the regulator.
Mr. Kim of Santacruise said many of his clients, who often are teenagers or in their 20s, aren’t properly covered by the law partly because they don’t know how or where to get help to regain control of their privacy online. He said that young people are so accustomed to digital devices in a country that is among the most wired in the world that online privacy often becomes an afterthought—sometimes with tragic results.
“Last year, a 15-year-old girl student asked us for help after Webcam footage of her naked body, apparently taken by her boyfriend, went viral on the Web and many of her classmates saw it,” Mr. Kim said. “She killed herself before we took action. I was so sad. We’re now offering our services for teenagers free of charge once they get consent from their parents.”
He said about half of his clients are underage youth, whose monthly data-removal requests surged to 192 in May from 29 in September last year.
The right to be forgotten, however, has divided experts and pitted privacy campaigners against defenders of free speech, who argue that easier online data deletion will lead to people glossing over their past.
A revised bill aimed at making online-data removal easier was proposed last year by a ruling Saenuri Party lawmaker but is still pending at a parliamentary subcommittee as some lawmakers and scholars oppose its passage.
“No one’s perfect. Everyone has a dark past. But if a new law is enacted to allow almost anyone to delete content simply because they don’t like what is said online, it will promote whitewashing of their wrong past,” said Hwang Sung-gi, a professor at Hanyang University’s law school.
He said a balance must be struck between privacy and the freedom of information and that the online industry needs to set up a workable system that can filter out fraudulent requests.
Lee Choong-woo, the chief executive of Skipper, which provides a data-removal service called Reputation Explorer, said his company already is attempting to strike that balance and has rejected many requests from people who try to improperly suppress legal information.
“Indeed, there is room for abuse. In one such case, a person who swindled online users out of money requested his past information removed. But we rejected his request, which otherwise would delete his crime records,” Mr. Lee said.
Mr. Kim at Santacruise said his company is also offering a service called Cyber Undertaker, which clears all digital information that has been left behind after one dies, although only a handful of clients have sought the service.
“Kids grow by learning from mistakes. If they remain haunted by mistakes they made as a kid for the rest of their lives, it’s too cruel for them,” Mr. Kim said. “Every time you meet a new person and he already knows what you did and what you said in the past, it’s like you’re going naked in public.”
Article Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/digital-launderers-offer-koreans-clean-slate-online-1412549255
Image Source:http://blogs.which.co.uk/technology/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Delete-key.jpg
VOCABULARY WORDS:
1. Malicious (adj.) ~ done with malice
2. Spring up (v.) ~ come into existence
3. Overdue (adj.) ~ coming or arriving after an scheduled or expected time
4. Commission (n.) ~ a fee or percentage allowed to a sales representative or an agent for services rendered
5. High-profile (n.) ~ a position attracting much attention and publicity
6. Database (n.) ~ a collection of data
7. Infringement (n.) ~ a violation of a right or privilege
8. Afterthought (n.) ~ a comment or reply that occurs to one after the opportunity to deliver it has passed
9. Consent (v.) ~ to agree or to give an approval
10. Gloss over (phrasal verb) ~ to make attractive or acceptable be deception
11. Whitewash (v.) ~ to conceal a wrongdoing
12. Swindle (v.) ~ to cheat of money or property
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
1. What is “digital laundry”?
2. Do you think that this kind of service should be available for everybody? Why?
3. The people who are against this argue that this could be used to whitewash people’s background and it might result to some people getting away with their mistakes. What do you think?
4. If ever there was something that you posted on the internet that you regretted later, would you avail of this service? Discuss your answer.
5. Teenagers are usually prone to posting pictures, videos, and comments that they will regret later on. Do you think that these things should be deleted or not? Why?
