South Korea’s privacy watchdog has fined the local units of Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior Couture, and Tiffany & Co. a combined 36 billion won (about $24.9 million) for failing to properly protect customer data.
The Personal Information Protection Commission said the decision was made during a plenary meeting on Wednesday. Louis Vuitton Korea received the heaviest penalty, a fine of 21.4 billion won, after a data breach affected around 3.6 million customers. According to the watchdog, hackers accessed personal information such as names, phone numbers, and birth dates on three separate occasions by compromising an employee’s device. The regulator pointed to weak security measures, particularly for remote login systems.
Christian Dior Couture Korea was fined 12.2 billion won following a breach involving about 1.95 million users. The watchdog said the company failed to detect the incident for nearly three months. Tiffany Korea was fined 2.4 billion won after the personal information of around 4,600 customers was exposed. In both cases, the leaked data included customer names and email addresses, after employees were deceived into granting system access to malicious actors.
In a separate case, the regulator fined Burger King operator BKR 924 million won for collecting personal information from children aged 13 or under without proper parental consent. Mega MGC Coffee operator MGC Global was also fined 642 million won for sending marketing messages to customers who had not agreed to receive them. The commission said eight other food and beverage companies were penalized for similar violations of the country’s personal data protection law.
Meanwhile, South Korea’s financial watchdog announced plans to tighten stock market rules. The Financial Services Commission said it will strengthen delisting standards on the KOSDAQ to speed up the removal of companies that fail to meet minimum requirements.
From July 1, firms with a market capitalization below 20 billion won will be delisted, with the threshold rising to 30 billion won at the start of next year, as part of efforts to improve market quality and support innovative startups.
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