SEOUL: South Korea has fined Chinese e-commerce giant Temu nearly US$1 million for illegally transferring Korean users’ personal information to China and other countries, a data protection watchdog said Thursday (May 15).
Chinese platforms such as Shein, Temu and AliExpress have skyrocketed in global popularity in recent years, offering a vast selection of products at stunningly low prices that have helped them take on United States titan Amazon.
Temu outsources and stores users’ data with companies in several countries, including China, Singapore, South Korea and Japan, according to Seoul’s Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC).
But the company “failed to disclose in its privacy policy or notify users that personal data would be entrusted to overseas entities”, it said in a statement.
The PIPC said it fined Temu around 1.39 billion won (US$997,624) for violating the data protection act.
The watchdog said Temu also failed to supervise overseas companies, including on data protection, and did not properly inspect their handling of personal information.
As of 2023, an average of 2.9 million users in South Korea were using Temu daily, but the company did not designate a local representative as required by South Korean data protection law, the watchdog said.
