모바일 게임산업환경에서의 개인정보보호에 대한 법정책적 고찰

Abstract

As the modern society has been changed to the informative society from the traditional industrial society, they put a great importance on the significance of protection of private information. After enforcing Privacy Protection Law, Korean society constructs the protection system of personal information. However, some strongly criticize it is a sort of over-watch or control of privacy because it does not reflect specific situation of each field into new legal system and the law itself sometimes put a heavy burden on the industry which collects and uses private information under its business model. So we need a careful approach to establish a private information protection policy to meet with needs of citizens and companies. Usually, as the first step of building an enforcible protection system of private information, we should fix the boundary of what the private information is. Under the Korean legal system, the meaning of private information is too broad to put a proper burden on obligators (usually companies). So several countries, such as U.S. and Japan, take a self-regulation system in the matter of private information protection in a private sector. Self-regulation system is usually welcomed in a social field in which regulation cost is high, but the benefit of regulation is small or unpredicted. In this aspect, we can consider the introduction of self-regulation system in mobile game industry regarding protection of private information. Mobile-game industry has suffered from extremely heavy burden on protection of private information under Privacy Protection Law which does not allow any exception according to the situation of regulated fields although mobile game industry actually does not collect private information but just technical information(serial number) of game devices to do proper game service to users. Technical information which is used by mobile-game industry is not identifiable for subjects but unstructured dataset. Also, the globalization of game industry makes policy-makers to reflect other countries policies, such as self-regulation policy of the U.S., regarding private information protection to set up an effective standard which all regulated subjects fully obey. Therefore, this is a proper time to establish a more effective system of protecting private information in mobile game industry by reducing a gap between reality and norms.