SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Over at the The Free Internet Project is a short article on users leaving the South Korean instant messaging service Kakao Talk.
Kakao Talk is South Korea's leading smartphone messaging application, used by 35 Million people (70% of the population). However a government crackdown over "false and malicious online posts", and the issuing of warrants for over 2,000 user accounts, appears to have sparked a migration with application usage tracker Rankey.com reporting that 400,000 used have left the service.
A competing application, Telegram, based in Germany which uses end to end encryption and has no servers in S. Korea, stated (in the BBC article) that it received over 1.5 Million sign ups from South Korean users in 7 days.
Kakao talk are very sorry:
Kakao CEO publicly apologized for Kakao's cooperation with law enforcement in the crackdown. "We regret that Daum Kakao failed to understand the anxiety of Kakao Talk users. In order to prevent ourselves from making the same mistake, we will make privacy our top priority when there is clash between privacy and law.”
There are summaries of the story and background available from the BBC and DW, as well as Korean independent paper The Hankyoreh.
(Score: 1) by Wrong Turn Ahead on Monday October 20 2014, @04:42PM
Not that I believe him but it is an interesting public statement, in that, I've not heard a single US CEO do the same. Consumers need to pressure corporate America into feeling SHAME for caving to government pressure and betraying customer trust so often.