Kakao, the operator of South Korea’s top mobile messenger KakaoTalk, was fined 242 million won ($200,700) on Monday for unilaterally sending out informational notification messages — which charge data usage fees — without sufficiently notifying users about the service.

Korea Communications Commission, the state-run media regulator, also slapped the company with a 100 million won penalty for failing to notify users that the URL addresses they exchanged via KakaoTalk were used in search query results on its portal website Daum. The URL transfers had taken place from January to June this year.

The KCC’s chairman Choi Sung-joon clarified that Kakao is “not being penalized for failing to obtain prior user consent in providing the service, but for failing to thoroughly inform users of what the notification service entails and what happens when they refuse to use it.”

KakaoTalk’s automated notification messages inform users of purchases, orders and deliveries made through the app as well as other partnered institutions and companies.

As of now, KakaoTalk users automatically receive notification messages when they are first sent. Afterwards, users can choose to refuse to receive such messages.

The KCC’s decision came after a months-long investigation that was initiated after local civic groups accused the Korean mobile giant of breaching a local telecommunications law that mandates companies notify customers of potential fees generated by a given service.

Kakao had emphasized that the messages, given their informational nature, should not require prior consent for viewing, similar to how users are not notified of the “costs” of clicking a banner ads on the internet.

It had also claimed the notification messages use up an insignificant amount of data — the first notification message uses up an average of 15 kilobytes of data, while subsequent messages each utilize just 2 kilobytes.

The Korean media regulator has ordered Kakao to devise clearer measures to let users decide whether they want to receive notification messages on KakaoTalk and to ensure that that users are thoroughly informed of the data usage costs generated by the notification service.

The KCC also mandated Kakao to enact similar measures regarding the firm’s handling of URLs shared on KakaoTalk, and to further strengthen its user protection policies to ensure similar issues are not raised in the future.

Kakao released a statement saying that “the KCC’s decision has effectively removed hurdles to running its notification message service” and that it will take measures to better inform users about its services in line with the commission’s orders. 

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com)