Coupang exposed thirty-seven million private lives and harvested your browsing history without asking. It was not a sophisticated cyberattack that cracked open the databases of names, phone numbers, and delivery addresses. The Personal Information Protection Commission found that the company simply failed to lock the door it left open. You are not a customer to a ledger this large; you are a unit of risk, a row in a spreadsheet, and a digital body left unguarded so the advertising engine could keep running.
The prophets warned against those who “trample on the needy and bring the poor of the land to an end” by manipulating the very scales of daily commerce (Amos 8:4). What is the scale today if not the algorithm? When the regulator fined this company 624.7 billion won, the language used was “inadequate safety management.” That is the corporate euphemism for a choice. You chose to collect records of eleven million online activities without permission, tracking which websites people visited and which applications they opened. You decided the profit margin justified the invasion.
I click “I agree” on the screens that stand between me and the groceries I need, feeding the machine that demands our surrender for the ease of modern life. We hand over the keys to our own inner rooms for cheap delivery and act surprised when the rooms are emptied. But our complicity does not excuse your theft. You refused to secure the vault, you obstructed the investigation, and you called on Washington to complain that Seoul was treating your ledger unfairly.
Coupang will tell you this was a failure of software, not character, and that it will fight the penalty in court to spare shareholders the weight of corporate malpractice. You will argue that no sophisticated hacker cracked a digital vault, but merely slipped through an unlatched door—that this is a technical lapse, not a moral one. But a door left unlatched in a marketplace holding thirty-seven million lives is not an accident; it is a ledger calculation. When you call on foreign powers to shield you from domestic accountability, you do not prove innocence; you prove that you understood the cost of doing business and hoped a larger government would absorb the fine. The law allows for regret, but the law also demands repentance.
You sit behind the glass in offices where human beings become data points. Emmanuel Levinas taught that the face of the other speaks a single moral command before any law is written: you shall not kill. When you reduce a person to a cookie, when you harvest a mother’s search for medicine to sell a banner ad, you are ignoring the face. Catholic Social Teaching names this pecado social — a sin built into the architecture that first tracks eleven million souls without consent and then leaves the vault unguarded against a common thief. The structure itself is engineered on the violation of the neighbor. You keep lists of journalists to restrict their employment, and you track digital movements as easily as you track shipping containers. This is not commerce; it is the instrumentalization of a neighbor.
You called on Washington to complain to Seoul, while lawmakers half a world away are finally waking up to the same ruthless arithmetic of data extraction. As state lawmakers move to ban personalized pricing as consumer-data tools expand, it proves the wiring of this machine is identical wherever profit touches human vulnerability, and exactly why it cannot regulate itself. Óscar Romero knew what it meant to name the structural violence of an economy built on the backs of the poor; he called it what it is. The door of return is open to you, but it requires a repentance you have not yet attempted. You must stop tracking the inner rooms of strangers. You must secure the servers. You must remember that the person behind the screen is a neighbor whose life is not your ledger. Put the scale back where it belongs and let the poor keep their own lives.