How Should One Respond to Personal Information Leaks on 'Bakusai.com'?

Bakusai.com is a bulletin board that aims to foster user interaction through highly segmented communities, with a focus on local engagement. However, it tends to have not only the defamation common to anonymous bulletin boards, but also a high incidence of personal information leaks.

We will explain about Bakusai.com, the leakage of personal information, and how to respond to defamation and privacy infringement.

What is Bakusai.com?

Bakusai.com is a local bulletin board composed of 13 boards, dividing Japan into 12 regions (Hokkaido, Tohoku, Kanto, Koshinetsu, Hokuriku, Tokai, Kansai, Sanyo, Sanin, Shikoku, Kyushu, Okinawa) and an overseas board.

Bakusai.com has announced the following as “What kind of site is Bakusai.com?”

• Bakusai.com is a popular bulletin board compatible with mobile 3 carriers (docomo, au, SoftBank) and smartphones, boasting 1 billion PV per month, covering topics of interest from Hokkaido to Okinawa and overseas.
• The number of bulletin board categories is an impressive 3354!
• From news bulletins, sports, videos, politics, economics, entertainment, to pachinko, slots, hostess clubs, hosts, adult entertainment, gambling, games, it is one of Japan’s largest local community bulletin boards with a wide range of genres.

Bakusai.com has a slightly different personality from other bulletin boards.

Subcategories of Bakusai.com

One of the unique features of Bakusai.com, not often seen on other bulletin boards, is its “strong local color”. While community-based communities have the advantage of smooth information sharing, there is also the fear that once malicious slander is posted, it will spread within the community in a very short time.

Bakusai.com has detailed boards at the city, ward, town, and village level for each regional bulletin board, and local information is exchanged anonymously, but there is a tendency for posts that slander or infringe on the privacy of specific individuals to increase. The cause is mainly due to the fact that many bulletin boards specialized in night work, such as “Cabaret Club Information”, “○○ Hostess & General Bulletin Board”, “Adult Entertainment Bulletin Board”, “Host Bulletin Board”, etc., are set up as subcategories.

Ease of Personal Identification

In addition, there are subcategories such as “Region x Store”, “Region x General”, and “Region x Individual” in the bulletin board category division, and bulletin boards for individuals working in host or hostess, adult entertainment related jobs can be created, leading to an increase in posts that string together insults and slander against people in such professions.

A woman working in a cabaret club may suddenly have her personal information such as real name and address exposed, private photos published, be slandered, and suffer from posts that constitute defamation and privacy infringement. In particular, one of the personalityistics of Bakusai.com is that there are many posts of insults and slander using pseudonyms or asterisks, and since it is a thread for each region, even if there are no posts of real names, it is easy to identify individuals, and not only the risk of being exposed to family or lovers that they are working in a cabaret club, but also the risk of stalking increases. There are many women who have had to change their jobs and addresses because their addresses were made public on Bakusai.com.

When You Wish to Request Article Deletion

At Bakusai.com, we respond to requests for deletion of negative posts. However, your request must be deemed legitimate, and just because you’ve applied for deletion doesn’t necessarily mean it will be granted. Furthermore, repeatedly making deletion requests may result in you being added to a blacklist as a complainer, which could prevent you from making any deletion requests at all.

Article 3 of the Bakusai.com Terms of Use states, “The following actions are prohibited on this site,” and lists:

• Posts seeking encounters and posts for the purpose of compensated dating
• Acts that infringe on the honor, social credit, privacy, portrait rights, publicity rights, copyright and other intellectual property rights, and other rights of others (including all those defined by laws and recognized in precedents)
• Listing of real names, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers (this does not apply to information generally made public or to public figures)
• Contents that include crime threats, inducement to suicide, and other threats or intimidation to others
• Fraud, coercion, pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes, or other illegal transactions, or solicitation for such transactions

However, determining whether defamation or privacy infringement has occurred can be difficult, and “names with asterisks” or “phone numbers with asterisks” that are easily recognizable to those around you are mostly judged as not being “real names” or “phone numbers”. Also, even if there are multiple posts you want to delete, there is a rule that you must apply for each one separately. Since defamation and privacy infringement are mostly established by reading multiple posts together, it can be difficult to get them recognized.

At the end of the deletion request page on Bakusai.com, it states, “We are careful about deletion because careless and excessive deletion may infringe on freedom of expression and judicial authority of the courts in judging illegality and harmful information.” You can easily make a deletion request, so it’s worth a try, but don’t get your hopes up too high.

https://monolith.law/reputation/bakusai-posts-deletion[ja]

When Your Request for Deletion is Not Honored

If your request for deletion is not honored by the operators of Bakusai.com, it may be necessary to take legal action.

Application for Provisional Disposition of Article Deletion

When you want an article to be deleted, you can apply to the court for a provisional disposition of article deletion. If approved, the Japanese website ‘Bakusai.com’ will comply with the article deletion. Not only for article deletion, but also when you want to identify the poster and claim damages, or when similar articles are posted again immediately after deletion, it would be beneficial to request the disclosure of sender information and pursue the responsibility of the poster.

Request for Disclosure of Sender Information

We apply for a provisional disposition for the disclosure of sender information on Bakusai.com, and obtain the disclosure of “IP address and timestamp”. From the IP address of the poster obtained in this way, we identify the transit provider and request the disclosure of sender information from the transit provider.

What kind of requests for disclosure of sender information are being made regarding Bakusai.com? Let’s take a look at some court precedents.

https://monolith.law/reputation/provisional-disposition[ja]

https://monolith.law/reputation/disclosure-of-the-senders-information[ja]

https://monolith.law/reputation/provider-liability-limitation-law[ja]

When Posts on Bakusai.com Constitute Defamation

A case occurred where a woman working at a cabaret club claimed that a post on Bakusai.com, which suggested she was providing escort services under her pseudonym, constituted defamation. After obtaining the IP address and timestamp from Bakusai.com, she requested the disclosure of the sender’s information from the intermediary provider.

The plaintiff, who was working under the pseudonym “B” at a cabaret club “b” located in Niiza City, Saitama Prefecture, had an article posted on the “b” thread within Bakusai.com stating, “Isn’t she an escort B?”

The court, in response to the intermediary provider’s claim that “the plaintiff cannot be identified because it is a pseudonym and not the plaintiff’s real name,” stated:

The article in question was posted on a bulletin board within Bakusai.com, where multiple threads titled “○○” exist for each adult entertainment establishment. The content of the posted articles is almost exclusively related to the respective establishments due to the threads being separated by establishment.

The article in question was posted on the thread for the cabaret club “b”, where the plaintiff had been working under the pseudonym “B” until three months before the article was posted.

Since the plaintiff was the only cabaret girl named “B” at “b” before the article was posted, it is possible to identify that the “B” in the article is the plaintiff.

Tokyo District Court, January 29, 2015 (Gregorian calendar year) ruling

The court acknowledged the possibility of identifying the plaintiff and, in response to the intermediary provider’s claim that “the article does not explicitly state that the plaintiff is working at an escort service,” stated:

When the article in question, “Isn’t she an escort B?”, is read with the ordinary care and interpretation of a general person, it can be said that it indicates the fact that the plaintiff is working as an escort, as “escort” is related to “B”.

Furthermore, “escort” is a common abbreviation for “delivery health”, generally referring to a service where women are dispatched to a man’s home or hotel to provide sexual services for a fee. Therefore, it can be said that indicating the fact that a woman is engaged in such sexual services lowers her social reputation.

Based on the above, it is clear that the plaintiff’s social reputation has been lowered and her personal rights have been violated by the article in question.

Tokyo District Court, January 29, 2015 (Gregorian calendar year) ruling

The court ordered the disclosure of the sender’s information.

This is a judgment of defamation, and it is a case where privacy information such as occupation, place of work, and pseudonym has been leaked.

It should be noted that a pseudonym is a name used by employees working in the nightlife industry within their establishments. Even when using this pseudonym, if the person can be identified by comparing the pseudonym with the content of the post, there is a high possibility that defamation can be established.

Just like in the case of initials or pseudonyms, not only when real names are posted, but also when real names are not posted, if the person in question can be identified, defamation, insult, and privacy violation can potentially be established. In other words, in a lawsuit, it is not always necessary to have a “real name” to “identify an individual”.

https://monolith.law/reputation/defamation[ja]

When Posts on Bakusai.com Constitute Privacy Invasion

In the “Kanto Edition” and “Kiryu City Chat” categories of Bakusai.com, there was a case where a plaintiff claimed their privacy rights were violated when their mobile phone number was repeatedly posted six times in a thread about Corporation A. After obtaining the IP address and timestamp from Bakusai.com, the plaintiff requested the disclosure of the sender’s information from the intermediary provider.

The intermediary provider refused to disclose the information, stating, “In this post, it is not explicitly stated that the numbers are the plaintiff’s mobile phone number, and general viewers cannot easily recognize that it is the mobile phone number used by the plaintiff.” Furthermore, “Since the mobile phone number does not fall under personal information as defined in Article 2, Paragraph 1 of the Japanese Personal Information Protection Law, it cannot be clearly stated that there is a violation of privacy rights.”

The court noted that there were a considerable number of posts defaming the plaintiff by displaying part of their name, such as “You guys really hate Kouyama, don’t you?”, “I hate Kouyama”, “Lewd Kouyama DQN”, “Anything goes in this company… Power harassment, sexual harassment are everyday occurrences, and Kouyama, the dog of Bulldog-chan”, “Pretending to be smart despite being stupid… Stupid woman”. In the thread with the name of the workplace, part of the real name was revealed, and furthermore,

The post in question begins with the number “090”, followed by a hyphen indicating a long vowel mark, and the number from the fourth digit onwards is written. In addition to the comment suggesting that this number is a woman’s number, considering that there were actual posts following this post that understood that the number in this post is a mobile phone number, it can be recognized that general viewers understand this post as one that lists a woman’s mobile phone number.

Tokyo District Court Judgment, November 6, 2015 (Gregorian calendar year)

The court ordered the disclosure of the sender’s information. In the judgment, it was stated that although a mobile phone number does not fall under personal information as defined in Article 2, Paragraph 1 of the Japanese Personal Information Protection Law, it is clear that it is information that one does not want to be disclosed against their will, so it is clear that this post violates the plaintiff’s privacy rights.

https://monolith.law/reputation/personal-information-and-privacy-violation[ja]

https://monolith.law/reputation/privacy-invasion[ja]

Summary

If personal information such as your real name, address, phone number, or any information that can easily infer these, is posted on bulletin boards or similar platforms, it is crucial to take swift action before it spreads. Especially in the case of community sites like Bakusai.com, which are closely tied to local communities, even if not explicitly stated, names, occupations, addresses, etc. can be easily identified. If left unattended, the damage can easily escalate, posing a risk.

Not only should you apply for deletion to the site administrators, but consulting with an experienced attorney can also enable a prompt response.