I was looking at the site earlier and saw this banner:

I’m in Seattle. I’m unemployed anyway, so even if my driver’s license information were leaked too, I guess I wouldn’t really care.

I’m Taro, a male member. I’d say Universe is pretty reputable. When you join, they make you sign a declaration for an organized-crime affiliation check, in addition to providing ID. I’m obviously fine, but you don’t see that very often with services like this (though maybe things have changed recently). This didn’t happen at Universe, but in the past there were occasional incidents where an email intended for members was sent with everyone in CC instead of BCC, allowing members to see one another’s email addresses. I was surprised that so many people used their work addresses rather than throwaway ones. In the end, though, it gave me an understanding of how the clientele differs between dating clubs, girls’ bars, and salons. Since Universe is reputable, I think the risk is relatively low. But it’s not zero, so you need to take precautions and be prepared for the risks. Even if it isn’t illegal, this is still something many people would be reluctant to tell others about. So this is a good question because it highlights that you need to think about the risks yourself and take precautions—you can’t expect other people to protect you. Thanks for asking.

Maezawa from the President’s Office here. > Depending on how Universe Club handles my information, I’m not sure I want to join. Google has experienced information leaks before, too, and I’m sure plenty of other major companies have had data breaches. Did you stop using Google because you were worried? Ultimately, if you’re that concerned, it seems difficult to avoid the risk without completely giving up anything internet-related—including smartphones and computers. I think that’s simply the kind of era we live in now. Even if you never register your information anywhere, it could still be leaked by a government agency. At that point, you might as well live alone on a deserted island, unaffiliated with any country. For the record, I don’t think Universe’s information management is necessarily better than other companies’, but I don’t think it’s worse, either. We operate nationwide and have more than 100 employees, so we take information management seriously.

I’m Kazu, a male member. I thought it over before joining. Even if the information were to leak, I figured the worst that could happen would be something like the Omi ai incident, where only an image of my driver’s license was exposed. Obviously, the license itself doesn’t say that I’m a member of the Universe Club. So even if the photo of my license taken by the staff when I joined were to come out, I could simply say, “What does an image of my driver’s license have to do with Universe or whatever?” That’s the conclusion I came to. These days, we use images of our driver’s licenses for identity verification all over the place, don’t we? Recently, I remember taking a photo of mine and sending it in to verify my identity for LINE Pay. So even if it did leak, I don’t think it would really hurt me. Also, after being a member for a while, I gradually got a sense of how the Universe Club links members’ records with identity-verification information such as their driver’s licenses. It seems they manage members’ ordinary records and identity-verification information separately and very carefully. I assume they only access the identity-verification information when there’s an incident or accident. Once I understood how the system worked, I thought, “That makes sense.”