By working together with schools and local governments across Japan and listening to feedback from our users, we are working to make LINE a more secure communication tool.
At the request of schools and local governments all across Japan, we conduct workshops to educate young people on how to use the internet in a healthy manner. Professional instructors teach children about the unique characteristics of communicating over the internet and social networks, as well as noteworthy points to pay attention to when using them. They also give pointers to parents and teachers about how to keep children out of trouble.
At LINE, we have developed materials to help children understand the differences between communicating with people over the internet and face-to-face. Together with experts, we have created educational cards and comics to help children understand the nature of the internet and its associated problems, and think about what to do when problems arise. Those materials are available free of charge on our website for anyone to use. (https://linecorp.com/en/safety/parents#block5)
Working in cooperation with local governments and experts, we conduct studies and research on how young people use the internet. The goal of this research is to improve our educational activities on netiquette, internet literacy, and how to avoid trouble online.
Local governments have traditionally provided anti-bullying counseling services primarily over the phone, email, or in-person. In order to makes it easier for children to seek advice, we operate a counseling hotline for bullying-related matters on LINE in cooperation with local governments, professional organizations, and groups.
Another important measure we have at LINE is creating features to ensure that people can use LINE in a safe and secure fashion. For example, we have restricted the ID search feature by using age authentication at sign-up, thus preventing users under the age of 18 from communicating with people they do not know over LINE. We also work hard to prevent spam, introducing such as features as the ability to report messages that are not from friends.
We believe that it is of upmost importance for users to be able to use our services safely and securely. In addition to putting in place a strict internal management system and working together with external experts and our users, we are meticulous in our security measures, including protecting our users' privacy and programming our applications in a secure fashion.
We take a proactive approach to working with our users' communities and strive to enrich society. Through our services and networks of people and information, we aim to create safer and stronger local communities.
LINE partners with local governments to create programs in response to the unique needs of individual communities. Those programs aim to help improve government services, educate people on netiquette and internet literacy, send out information on regional "branding," and more.
To help improve access to public information and government services, we have provided Official Accounts to several Japanese ministries.
The LINE messaging service was born shortly after the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011 under the concept that there needed to be a service that allows people to keep in touch with those important to them, especially in difficult times. Due to that experience, we have put ourselves fully behind adding features that will be useful to people in critical situations.
In addition to helping those affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake, we have also provided recovery assistance to other areas struck by disaster, both in Japan and abroad. These efforts have included fundraising through stickers and other LINE services, as well as making LINE Out calls free to the affected regions for a certain period of time.