“The police on Monday turned over their case to prosecutors on Safety Inc., one of the three name list companies, and its 45-year-old president, on suspicion of selling the data to an education service company in Kumamoto Prefecture, knowing the data had been illegally obtained.”
I have some familiarity with these so-called “education service companies” in Kumamoto. For example, the elementary school we sent our children to stopped having parents make up lists with the phone numbers of other parents in the same class because the slime-bag “education service companies” kept finding ways to steal the data (in some cases by impersonating other parents on the phone and asking for numbers) and then flooding parents with calls trying to get them to enroll their kids in various juku. They got me really angry. This incident with Benesse was big but the same kind of thing has been going on for years on a smaller scale and, for reasons I don’t fully understand, the “education service companies” have continued to operate with impunity.
By the way, since the “education service companies” routinely abuse the private information of parents, why not publish the name of the company in this article? Why the sudden concern about the company’s “privacy”?
This rant has been brought to you by Kirk :)