Naver

Naver's SmartPlace tool for merchants included a booking setting, introduced in June 2025 and revealed publicly in July 2026, instructing business owners: 'If you do not wish to accept reservations and bookings from foreigners, change the setting to off.' Naver said the feature was meant to let merchants avoid processing fees (about 3.85%) and chargeback risk on overseas-issued cards rather than to block foreign customers, but acknowledged the wording 'failed to distinguish between foreign customers and cards issued overseas' and committed to renaming it to a 'global reservation/booking setting.'

In March-April 2024 Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications issued an administrative guidance to LY Corporation (the Naver/SoftBank joint parent of Line) demanding it review and 'reconsider' Naver's involvement, following a 2023 data breach that exposed approximately 519,000 records. Critics including the Korean government characterised the move as a Japanese government attempt to engineer Naver's exit from Line, the dominant messaging platform in Japan. Naver eventually committed to reducing its 50% stake in LY Corporation under sustained pressure.

In August 2023 Naver released HyperClova X, a Korean-first foundation model trained on a corpus that was 97% Korean and 3% English, representing one of the few production-scale LLMs prioritising a non-English language. The release was significant for Korean-language AI sovereignty and reduced dependence on US-trained models for Korean-language applications. Naver also released smaller HCX-Mini variants for on-device and edge deployment in 2024.

In May 2021 a 40-year-old Naver developer died by suicide, leaving notes alleging severe and sustained workplace bullying by his manager. Subsequent Ministry of Employment and Labor inspection found Naver had violated labor law by failing to take action on harassment complaints filed for months prior. CEO Han Seong-sook stepped down in March 2022 in connection with the incident. Naver later instituted independent anti-harassment reporting channels and an external ethics board.