A Nagasaki headquartered SNS focusing on connecting classmates that you used to be together with has been closed since early May, which incites its 3.5 million users about possible personal data leak and forces them to lose ways to keep in touch one another.
The SNS is “Kono Yubi Tomare[J]” also known as “Yubitoma”, named after a Japanese traditional kid’s play custom: when a kid suggests an activity to his friends, he holds up his index finger and shouts: “If you want to do something, then grab my finger!”.
Yubitoma was founded in 1997 by a housewife in Nagasaki, specifically for encouraging alumni association activities by entering the name of the university or the school from which you have graduated so as to connect you with your classmates.
On May 2nd, without advance notice, Yubitoma announced it would keep closed for the time being due to critical technical faults caused. Since the incident, some news media have been attempting to contact the service’s management to find out the situation, but nobody has yet succeeded to interview them.
Yubitoma is also known for the incident that its ownership has been taken over by gangsters while the company’s founder has been running for the Nagasaki prefectural governor. (But she was defeated in the election.) The directors of the company’s board were entirely renewed last year, and the company used be heading forward to expand its business.
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May 31st, 2009 Update:
According to the website updated, Yubitoma’s owner company approved its ownership would be handed over to a third party, which is called Yubitoma Restructuring Committee, consisting of the company’s corporate partners and several numbers of individual Yubitoma-goers. The company says, it schedules to re-open the service on June 14th and there is no possibility of personal data leak.
Masaru IKEDA