On January 6th, the NHN announced that a major reform was carried out. It decided not to keep its users’ social security numbers when they sign up for Naver, one of the biggest Korean portal sites.
Currently, the NHN requires only basic information such as telephone number to sign up for Naver, but it additionally requires social security numbers from its users for such activities as making financial transactions and writing comments.
Still its users must confirm their identities by entering their social security numbers in order to sign up for Naver. However, those collected social security numbers will be immediately disposed after a credit-rating agency uses them for verification purpose.
The NHN discarded its existing users’ social security numbers at once and minimized the required fields to only name, ID, and phone number, all of which will be used for changing a password. And it intensified its level of security to prevent any potential hacking problems by running a committee for the protection of privacy and by establishing a private data masking system (PDMS), which encrypts the document or data that contains its users’ personal information.
Furthermore, by providing practical information about the right way to protect one’s personal information and the right way to use internet through the blogs (http://privacy.naver.com and http://green.naver.com), the NHN is continuously trying to communicate with its existing, new, and potential users and to create a clean and safe internet environment.
