Line is a privately owned company headquartered in Japan, with LY Corporation as its parent company. Established in 2000, it employs approximately 4,100 individuals, specializing in software development. The company operates a communications platform, primarily serving as a messenger service in Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand. Beyond its core functionality of free instant messaging and VoIP calls, the platform integrates social media, mobile payments via LINE Pay, news aggregation through LINE TODAY, and specialized services such as LINE Doctor and LINE Music. As of 2026, LINE functions as a central lifestyle ecosystem for over 200 million monthly active users, leveraging its character IP (LINE FRIENDS) and an extensive API for businesses to provide an experience that bridges personal communication and daily transactions.
On July 31, 2026, Seven & i Holdings and Seven-Eleven Japan established strategic partnerships with LY Corporation and SoftBank PayPay, alongside Sumitomo Mitsui Card Partners, to integrate physical and digital capabilities aimed at shaping next-generation customer experiences. Previously, on July 27, LY Corporation, which operates LINE and Yahoo! services in Japan, disclosed that it deleted legally required advertising records. These records, related to matching customer data uploaded by businesses with Line user data for targeted advertising and messaging, were removed between December 15, 2022, and June 9, 2026. This followed LY Corporation's disclosure on July 13 that a misconfigured advertising analytics tool had silently transmitted internal user identifiers from three LINE GAME titles to a third-party partner. The issue, which the company discovered in April 2026, resulted in a 1409-day exposure affecting approximately 6.1 million unique users.
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