Japan’s popular messaging app LINE recently admitted that its users’ personal data stored on its server in Japan could be accessed by China-based engineers that the company had outsourced to. In an official response, LINE admitted that user data had been accessed more than 32 times and that it is now setting up a committee to rectify the situation. According to a report by Japan’s public broadcaster NHK, LINE had outsourced its system maintainance since 2018 to a company in Shanghai, which allowed four China-based engineers to access to Japanese users’ personal data and information stored on servers in Japan, including users’ names, phone numbers, emails, and even the contents of the communication between users. The foreign access to the personal data of Japanese nationals may have been in violation of Japan’s Personal Information Protection Act, which requires that if user’s personal information is transferred to a foreign third party, user …