KakaoTalk

Is KakaoTalk safe?

For everyday chat, payments and group coordination in South Korea, KakaoTalk is reliable and almost impossible to avoid. For private conversations, it is a weak choice. Normal chats are not end-to-end encryptedEnd-to-end encryptionEncryption in which only the sender and the recipient can read a message. The company running the service cannot see its content.More in the glossary, Kakao earned a record privacy fine over a leak of open chat user data, and the app has grown into an advertising and shopping platform that collects accordingly. We score it 43/100, close to LINE (44), well below WhatsApp (67) and above WeChat (36).

Is KakaoTalk end-to-end encrypted?

Only if you choose it. Kakao introduced Secret Chat in December 2014, after a public row over Korean prosecutors' access to messages. Secret Chat stores the decryption keys on users' phones rather than Kakao's servers, so Kakao cannot read the conversation. It was later extended to group chats. But it is opt-in, you must open a separate Secret Chat room, and most people never do.

Everything else, including normal one-to-one chats, group chats and open chats, is encrypted only on the way to Kakao's servers. Kakao's privacy policy confirms that message text, images, video and audio pass through its servers, and that it records who received content and when.

The open chat leak and the ₩15.1 billion fine

Open chat lets people join topic-based rooms under a separate profile, without sharing their phone number. In 2023 Korean media reported that open chat users' data was being sold on websites alongside marketing tools. The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) investigated and found that attackers had exploited Kakao's friend-adding function to match open chat serial numbers, which Kakao had not encrypted before August 2020, with users' phone numbers and profile names. At least 65,710 users were affected, and data on 696 of them was sold.

In May 2024 the PIPC fined Kakao ₩15.1 billion (about $11 million), the largest privacy penalty it had imposed on a Korean company, and said Kakao had failed to report the leak once it knew. Kakao called the attackers' actions illegal and argued that serial numbers were not personal information. It sued, and on 15 January 2026 the Seoul Administrative Court ruled for the PIPC, saying Kakao should at least have recognised the risk and that failing to notify the authorities and users was illegal.

What happened in the 2022 outage?

On 15 October 2022 a fire broke out in a battery room at SK C&C's data centre in Pangyo, which hosted Kakao's core systems. The government's investigation found that the backup power was in the same room as the batteries, and that although Kakao had backup servers elsewhere, the controls to switch to them could only be operated through the SK C&C site. Kakao services were down for up to 127 hours and 30 minutes. The ministry ordered Kakao, SK C&C and NAVER to propose measures against a repeat. For a country that runs its daily life on KakaoTalk, it showed how much depends on one company.

The 2025 redesign controversy

On 23 September 2025 Kakao launched its biggest update in 15 years. The Friends tab, previously a simple contact list, became an Instagram-style feed showing friends' profile photo changes, with ads mixed in, and a new tab added short-form videos. Users complained about seeing colleagues' personal photos and about their own photos being pushed to others without choosing to share them. The Google Play rating fell to 2.8. Parents objected that children in school group chats could not avoid the short videos, and the only restriction required sending Kakao documents such as a family relations certificate. Six days after launch, Kakao said it would make the list the default again by the end of 2025.

What KakaoTalk collects

Apple's label shows user ID, device ID and advertising data used to track you across other companies' apps. Google Play's data safety section says KakaoTalk shares app interactions, a list of installed apps, device IDs and approximate location with other companies for analytics and advertising. The privacy policy covers personalised advertising by Kakao and its partners based on estimated interests, and now includes terms for ChatGPT inside KakaoTalk.

How to use KakaoTalk more safely

1. Use Secret Chat for anything personal, financial or legal.
2. In open chats, use a profile that does not reveal your real name or photo.
3. Treat messages from "family" on a new number asking for money or gift cards as phishing until you have called them.
4. Restrict who can see your profile in privacy settings.
5. Keep a second way to reach important contacts, such as SMS or another messenger, in case Kakao goes down again.

How we scored it

Regulatory record (40) and privacy (38) are the weakest factors, because of the record PIPC fine and advertising-driven data sharing. Security (42) reflects the lack of default end-to-end encryptionEnd-to-end encryptionEncryption in which only the sender and the recipient can read a message. The company running the service cannot see its content.More in the glossary and the leak. Transparency and control (50) is the strongest, thanks to a detailed policy and Korean privacy rights.