LINE app, B612 app lawsuit investigation

LINE and B612 apps: Who’s affected?

Did you or someone in your Illinois or California household use the LINE or B612 apps to send messages or create videos from 2016 to 2021? Your personal identifiers may have been given to others, including the Chinese Communist Party, without your consent.

Two web apps are alleged to have allowed China-based actors to access users’ personal information or private messages to others, meaning that the Chinese Communist Party could have vacuumed up the data as part of its vast spy operation.

The apps are called B612 and LINE Messenger, and both make use of SenseTime, Chinese-based artificial intelligence (AI) that can identify people with facial measurements gleaned from photographs.

All three are entangled in a network of companies that work together to further develop and control the apps, which are highly popular throughout Asia. The apps are available to U.S. users of smartphones and other devices through vendors including Google Play, where its disclaimers didn’t reveal what is actually happening to the information you feed it.

LINE Messenger

LINE Messenger is the leading messaging service in Japan, although employees are banned from using it for government work because of a data breach that is thought to have been organized by the Chinese Communist Party in 2021.

It is also popular in Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia. It is estimated that LINE was used in the U.S. by some 3.15 million people in September 2019.

The app can be particularly alluring to young people who discover it through other young users because they can send encrypted messages to each other that only they are supposed to be able to read. It would appear then that with LINE Messenger you can’t read your kids’ messages, but the Chinese government can.

B612

B612 is a photo and video app that offers “various free features and tools to make every moment more special. Meet trendy effects filters and stickers that are updated every day!” according to an advertisement. For example, you can use selfies to create clever, slick video comic strips.

B612 is claimed to have been downloaded more than 1 billion times, 150 million times in India alone.

The appeal is obvious. The alleged danger isn’t.

A vast network of spies

Gathering information about anybody and everybody is routine practice for the Chinese government, according to various sources, among them Minxin Pei, the author of “The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China,” a book published in February 2024 and excerpted in Foreign Policy the same month.

“Beijing’s approach to taming the information revolution is unique: It has focused on controlling access to the internet, not just censoring its content. Chinese authorities prioritize knowing who is online — and this allows them to identify, track, intimidate, and punish those who are potential threats” to the party, Pei writes.

SenseTime is affiliated through Softbank with Naver, a South Korean corporation at the top of the organization of interacting companies involved with LINE Messenger and B612. It has long been a known culprit in Asia, having been called out by news organizations for gathering user information without permission since 2016 — including children’s nicknames, personal information and family photos — and sending these identifiers to Hong Kong.

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2017 that Chinese companies routinely collaborate with the Chinese government and that is not a secret “in a country where the Communist Party controls both the legal system and the right to function as a business.”

The New York Times published a lengthy expose in 2021 reporting that Apple has found legal loopholes to cooperate with Chinese “security” requirements in order to do business there.

But that is not what we demand, legally and ethically, from companies doing business in the United States. It is unclear how information gathered in the U.S. is used, how widely it is disseminated for Chinese government purposes or for commercial reasons elsewhere, or if various groups or individuals are being targeted and monitored here, as they are in China.

It is reported that using all the information it can gather, China punishes its citizens for any action or connection deemed dangerous to the Chinese Communist Party, from buying too many video games to surreptitiously or overtly defying rules. Punishments can include slow internet speeds, public surveillance, criminal detention, imprisonment, fines, denial of political rights, confiscation of property, the ability to travel, and even death.

U.S. government sanctions

SenseTime is on the Department of Commerce “Entity List” of “foreign Individuals, companies and organizations deemed a national security concern, subjecting them to export restrictions and licensing requirements for certain technologies and goods,” in essence forbidding American firms from doing business with SenseTime. The Treasury Department banned U.S. investment in SenseTime citing human rights violations against more than 1 million ethnic Uyghurs.

“Mike Pompeo, as the outgoing secretary of state in 2021, formally declared that China had committed genocide against the Uyghurs; current Secretary of State Antony Blinken has reaffirmed that assessment,” said The Washington Post, citing the creation of “reeducation sites” where detainees faced torture, forced abortions, sterilization and forced marriages.

Tracking in China

Although the Chinese developed and use the SenseTime artificial intelligence facial recognition component, LINE Messenger is blocked from use in China, although it is widely reported that tracking is a key feature of China’s approved message apps. In business, for example:

“Unlike the situation in many Western organizations, where email content is considered personal and confidential, the prevailing sentiment in China is that all communication, both inbound and outbound, is subject to scrutiny…. This practice reflects a broader societal acceptance of the notion that privacy is subordinate to the collective interests of the organization and, by extension, the state.”

Tracking in the U.S.

LINE and B612, with their SenseTime components, are available in the U.S., promising security. Lawyers in Illinois and California are currently sorting out an extraordinarily complicated case to find the best ways to stop the secret collection of personal data from the app, and to seek compensation for those who were harmed

Join a LINE Messenger and B612 lawsuit

People living in the United States have a right to privacy that consumers say was not being honored by the apps called LINE Messenger and B612, alleging that personal information, was taken and not protected from the Chinese government.

If you are a resident of Illinois or California and you or a family member used the apps from 2016 to 2021,  you may qualify to participate in lawsuit investigation.

Please fill out the form on this page to see if you qualify for a FREE case evaluation.