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The story
It has come to light that NTT Docomo provided phone numbers and other information belonging to 344,213 rate-plan subscribers to Amazon Japan without obtaining valid consent. On November 6, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications determined that this violated the Telecommunications Business Act and announced it had issued written administrative guidance to the company. On the forum, some posters pinned the cause on a consent-confirmation screen that failed to appear when linking d Points and Amazon accounts, while many others questioned whether mere administrative guidance was an adequate response to a data disclosure affecting over 340,000 people.
NTT Docomo provided the phone numbers and other information of 344,213 rate-plan subscribers to Amazon Japan without obtaining valid consent. On November 6, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications announced that it had issued written administrative guidance to the company after determining that user information had not been properly managed, in violation of the Telecommunications Business Act.
Source: japan.cnet.com / Original article here
What people said
They're clearly trying to use the chaos as cover to sweep this under the rug
This is pretty malicious
No, that's not it.
It's actually a pretty minor thing — when customers went through the process of linking their d Point account, the site just didn't show the "Do you agree?" consent screen.
I'd think people would kind of assume their info gets shared automatically when you link accounts anyway
Yeah, who cares
Yeah, and their signal sucks too
You know this is really just about keeping the amakudari pipeline open, right? (amakudari: retired bureaucrats landing cushy jobs at the companies they used to regulate)
KDDI: trashes the environment in Mongolia
SoftBank, Rakuten: did anything happen with them recently?
Rakuten ended its roaming deal with au
Rakuten got criticized for investing in some drone company or something, I think
Well, they do make political donations
I'm a SoftBank user — total victory
Setsuko, that's not the real Amazon, that's "Amaz0n" with a zero (riffing on the famous "Setsuko, that's not X, that's Y" meme)
And yet you don't even get d Points unless you spend ¥5,000 — Amazon's so stingy
If it's just "administrative guidance," isn't that not even a punishment?
They just forgot to put the clause allowing it into the contract.
There's usually some catch-all line like "we may share information with third parties to improve our services" that covers them — guess even that wasn't there?
500 d Points (lol)
Wait, did this leak include My Number (Japan's national ID number) too?
Background and Key Points of the Discussion
This administrative guidance was issued because Docomo violated the duty to “properly manage user information” under the Telecommunications Business Act. As posters on the thread noted, it is not a punishment carrying criminal penalties, but merely a non-binding measure by which the Ministry urges the company to improve its operations. As for the cause, comment #175 points out that the consent screen likely simply failed to appear when users linked their d Point and Amazon accounts — suggesting this is closer to a procedural oversight than a case of malicious data trafficking. Opinion on the thread split over how serious the penalty should be: some questioned whether “administrative guidance” alone was adequate for a disclosure affecting over 340,000 people, while others argued that if it really was just a forgotten consent screen, a light response was understandable. Some posts also confused this incident with a separate Docomo-related data leak reported around the same time — worth flagging for readers, since the two are in fact unrelated cases.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “Docomo Shared 340,000 Users’ Data with Amazon Without Consent, Ministry Issues Guidance…“
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