Hilarious timing by Yonhap (S. Korea's public news agency) --- they reported this morning, just as the raid was about to begin: "Google ranked #1 as foreign company people want to work for" (in Korean):
http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/economy/2010/08/10/0302000000AKR...
"According to the results of job portal JobsKorea's research on 814 university students on August 10, the foreign-invested company most desired to work for was Google, in first place with 23.1% of respondents. Afterwards were 9.0% for Yuhan Kimberly (a Kimberly-Clark JV), 5.3% for Citibank, 4.8% for IBM, and 3.2% for Sony."
As for this incident ... well, Internet privacy in Korea was always a crapshoot anyway, seeing as you have to send your citizen's id and real name to sign up for social networking sites, random forums, online shopping and games, or to verify your age so you can search for "breast cancer" or "genital warts" on Naver.
Not to minimise the very real concerns over what the hell Google is doing, but this raid smells of some ambitious young public prosecutors who want to make a name for themselves by taking on a big foreign company (and ignoring all the domestic companies whom I highly doubt have been entirely on the up-and-up about what they do with their 100% personally identifiable data about the members of their own sites). Incidentally, remember that last year, Google explicitly chose to disable Youtube comments and uploads from Korea rather than comply with the real name registration requirements ...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/162989/google_disables_upload...
"According to the results of job portal JobsKorea's research on 814 university students on August 10, the foreign-invested company most desired to work for was Google, in first place with 23.1% of respondents. Afterwards were 9.0% for Yuhan Kimberly (a Kimberly-Clark JV), 5.3% for Citibank, 4.8% for IBM, and 3.2% for Sony."
As for this incident ... well, Internet privacy in Korea was always a crapshoot anyway, seeing as you have to send your citizen's id and real name to sign up for social networking sites, random forums, online shopping and games, or to verify your age so you can search for "breast cancer" or "genital warts" on Naver.
Not to minimise the very real concerns over what the hell Google is doing, but this raid smells of some ambitious young public prosecutors who want to make a name for themselves by taking on a big foreign company (and ignoring all the domestic companies whom I highly doubt have been entirely on the up-and-up about what they do with their 100% personally identifiable data about the members of their own sites). Incidentally, remember that last year, Google explicitly chose to disable Youtube comments and uploads from Korea rather than comply with the real name registration requirements ... http://www.pcworld.com/article/162989/google_disables_upload...