The hugest IPO of the year in Japan was Mixi, a Japanese social networking site (kind of like MySpace) that exploded onto the scene and now boasts some 7 million users. It is the darling of the new business world with buzz, buzz and more freaking buzz throughout the news media. However, a shocking incident destroyed the lives of a couple and led to cancellation of thousands of user accounts. But this did not make the news in Japanese or English…

Mixi is an invitation-only social networking system that through word-of-mouth, through explosive growth. So big and so hot this service became that it went IPO and went through the roof. It was (and remains) the bees knees.

However, there is a dark side.

The Ass Hair Burger Incident
The information to follow largely comes from Herro Flom Japan (link below), the only English source I could find (there are lots of things in Japanese).
One user experienced a security breech on his computer and this led to somebody downloading all the data on that computer, including his and his girlfriend’s Mixi account information, and pictures of his girlfriend posing spread-eagled naked (the ass hair hamburger). The data was shared around and reconstituted to reveal the girl’s personal, educational and work information and finally dropped into the infamous forum/bulletin site 2channel. The data was out, these peoples lives were devastated and the fallout from the incident led to massive account deletions, impact on the stock price and sent the blogosphere screaming. This was major news in Japan… NOT. There are over 250,000 pages about the Ass Hair Burger but zero news articles on Google Japan. Further scanning shows that a few weeklies (trashy tabloids, with some investigative stuff) picked it up, but the mainstream silence was deafening.

This is just a snippet of the incident and issues relating to security and privacy in Japan. To hear the whole story from Herro Flom Japan just head to the Ass Hair Burger Festival. Please, please, please check out the full story!

I originally heard about it was a conversation with one of the lords of Chin Music Press and Canned Coffee. Cheers guys.

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