President Lee Jae Myung instructed a comprehensive inquiry and severe penalties for the large-scale data breach that occurred at Coupang. Lee expressed his worries about the increase in data leaks and called on the government to impose stricter penalties and efficient measures, citing international norms for enforcing punitive damages.
“The scale of the damage is massive, involving about 34 million cases, but it is truly shocking that the company failed to detect the breach for five full months after the initial incident,” the president said during a Cabinet meeting at the presidential office in Yongsan District, Seoul.
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“We must swiftly identify the cause of this accident and hold those responsible strictly accountable. I urge you to mobilize all available resources to prevent secondary damages arising from the misuse of this leaked information.”
“This is also an opportunity to completely overturn the misguided practices and perceptions that trivialize the protection of personal data — a core asset in the age of AI (artificial intelligence) and digital technology,” he says.
“As we face a hyperconnected digital society, please urgently prepare and implement a new digital security framework that amounts to a paradigm shift, encompassing both the private and public sectors.”
Coupang experienced a large data breach that has made South Koreans anxious, but the company's founder and leader, Kim Bom-suk, also known as Bom Kim, has not been part of the discussion about accountability. Critics are pointing out that the company's ownership and management system allows him to wield significant power over the online retail company without taking responsibility for significant events.
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Park Dae-jun, the CEO of Coupang Corp. (Coupang Korea), issued an apology on Sunday for the data breach involving 33.7 million customers, which likely includes all of its customers. He mentioned that the company will work closely with authorities to avoid similar problems and reassess its data security measures.
Almost 65 percent of South Korea's population are known to be victims of a recent incident involving inadequate security measures and mishandling by the company, causing public outrage to grow. Various online platforms have emerged with the intention of initiating a collective legal action against Coupang, with one forum on Naver attracting over 70,000 members. Politicians have also joined in the criticism, demanding accountability and tighter regulation.
Coupang's responses to the mounting uproar have been supervised by Park, a government affairs specialist who became co-CEO in 2020 after joining the company in 2012. Following a major fire at one of its logistics centers in Gyeonggi Province that resulted in the death of a firefighter, the founder stepped down from Coupang Corp.'s board in 2021.
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Kim, a Korean American business owner, is in charge of the company as both the CEO and board chairman of Coupang Inc., a Delaware-based corporation that is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Coupang Inc. is the sole owner of Coupang Global LLC, which in turn has full ownership of Coupang Corp. In April, according to a regulatory filing by Coupang Inc., Kim was reported to have 164.4 million shares, which include stock options, accounting for around 9 percent of the company's total 1.8 billion shares. Kim primarily holds Class B shares, which have 29 times more voting rights than Class A shares, providing him with an effective voting power of 74.3 percent.