Errors found in Osaka Expo pavilion's privacy policy
Errors have been found in a privacy policy related to the Osaka Healthcare Pavilion at the 2025 World Exposition in the city of Osaka, sources said Wednesday.
Discussions are underway on whether to correct the errors, the sources said. The expo is set to open on April 13.
The pavilion, to be run by Osaka Prefecture and the city of Osaka, will collect visitors' health data including on muscle, bones, skin, hair, teeth, brain cognition and others to generate an avatar, in addition to personal information including email addresses and dates of birth.
The pavilion operator says that the data will be provided to sponsor companies after the deletion of information that can be used for personal identification. Visitors will be required to give consent that covers the privacy policies of more than 10 sponsor companies.
However, the privacy policy of SBI Holdings, one of the sponsors, states that the data before the deletion will be provided to the company.
The pavilion operator said that SBI's policy lists data that is not supposed to be provided to it and contains factual errors.
Meanwhile, an SBI official said that the company released its policy after having the pavilion operator check its contents.
The two are considering whether to correct the errors.
Chuo University professor Hiroshi Miyashita, who has expertise in information laws, said that visitors' consent should be based on the premise that the same data is used in every process of data provision.
"If different data is used, the visitors' consent should be considered invalid and provision of the data to a third party could be considered illegal," he said.
The expo's own privacy policy had already sparked controversy for requiring visitors buying tickets to agree to the possibility of their biometric information being provided to a third party.
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