빅데이터와 개인정보보호

Abstract

The amount of data in our world has been exploding. Big data is now part of every sector and function of the global economy. Big Data provide positive aspects such as efficiency, convenience and new utility creation. However Big Data bring about various new problem such as infringement on privacy. Big Data, which arises as new growth power, contributes to promote public interest or to reinforce competitive power of industry. It is fully expected that using Big Data will become more popular within next years. There has been a great deal of effort to utilize Big Data around the World and South Korea is not an exception. Such an aspect reveals the start of a new ICT environment as well as new social issues. It will be reasonable to state that the global internet industry concentrates on the new ICT environment where a large amount of data mass-produced from human digital activities are newly processed and commercialized. In line with the start of this big data environment, currently, there are large-scale discourses to revise the personal data protection policies. As commercial companies using Big Data, one of the most common legal issues will be customers’ privacy and protection of personal information. More specifically, companies accumulate the consumer’s purchase history data which allows the companies to advertise and recommend certain products to those customers. In this case, one of the legal issues that could be raised is whether this type of data or information can be considered as a personal information so that the customers can be protected by a privacy protection act or not. The scope of the current study is limited to utilization of Big Data by commercial companies and privacy or personal information protection.