Remember the “digital prison,” an illegal personal information leak site created disclosing personal information about violent criminals after the ‘Nth room’ incident in March last year? Whether their intentions were good or not, there was an incident in which a college student committed suicide, and a medical professor complained of injustice by disclosing the identities of innocent people with inaccurate information. Since then, digital prisons have been blocked several times following a decision by the Korea Communications Standards Commission, and the site’s operator has been accused of defamation.
As in the above case, disclosing personal information is also active in the community of Yeungnam University. Among the posts of the “Everytime” site, there are often postings accusing someone or a group of groundless rumors and what is commonly called “sniper writing.” Sometimes, personal information such as initial consonants of a person’s name, affiliation, age, etc. can be posted together. Some postings reveal the identities of innocent people with uncertain facts. In this case, the person who is disclosed is branded with a bad image due to the posting, and the stigma is not easily removed, causing continuous damage.
In addition to Everytime, many sniper writings are also posted on Facebook’s “Bamboo Forest of Darkness at Yeungnam University.” On this page, the report, which includes names, and reports that do not have proper tone and vocabulary among political/religious topics, are posted after proper filtering. However, if you look at the posts, there is still much content that can infer personal information such as initial consonants to guess a specific section.
Personal disclosure can be subject to legal punishment. There have been cases of punishment for sharing or distributing the identities of criminals on state-run websites such as “Sex Offender Notification e” or sex offender inquiry sites. This carries up to five years in prison, and a penalty of up to 50 million won as a way to reduce secondary damage caused by the disclosure of personal information. As you can see in the above case, sharing personal information released by the state to others is also punished. Therefore, it is reasonable to receive greater punishment to dig up and distribute someone's personal information. If the sniper post contains information that enables one to guess a specific person, it can be punished by defamation. If the content of the article is false, it will face stricter punishment for defamation of false information.
