Representational Inage. Reuters
Seoul: The apex court in South Korea has ordered tech giant Google to divulge any personal information it has gathered about South Korean people and shared with US intelligence services and other parties, if any.
According to reports, the decision came as multiple South Korean complainants filed lawsuits against Google and its local affiliate, Google Korea, to compel the corporation to disclose if it had collected or shared their data.
The complaints alleged Google of using its “PRISM” programme in order to pass on personal information of South Koreans to US National Security Agency (NSA).
The NSA is already under scrutiny for collecting personal data of people from around the world along with other important information available either on the internet or they directly acquire from the service providers.
As per reports, South Korean law requires internet service providers to respond to requests from users regarding their own personal data and whether it has been shared with outside parties, an appeals court previously ruled that Google had the right to refuse such requests as long as the choice was compliant with US law.
Although it sent the case back to a lower court for further litigation, the Supreme Court largely overruled that decision by concluding that Google must provide the pertinent information upon request regardless of American law.
The court stated in a statement that “comprehensive consideration should be given to whether the need to respect foreign laws is significantly superior to the need to protect personal information.”
The highest court also ruled that businesses must report the information that personal data was supplied to a foreign intelligence service even if it was done for lawful purposes and after the subject of the data was no longer a suspect.
In a statement, Google Korea stated that it will “carefully” analyse Thursday’s judgement and insisted that customer privacy was a top concern for the business.
Google’s PRISM programme
After NSA contractor Edward Snowden stole a vast collection of top-secret documents outlining, among other things, the scope of domestic mass monitoring in the United States, the PRISM programme was first made public in 2013.
After being introduced in 2007 by President George W. Bush, PRISM allegedly used to be “the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports.”
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