기업의 빅데이터(Big Data) 활용과 개인정보의 보호의 조화

There has been a great deal of effort to utilize Big Data around the World and South Korea is not an exception. It is fully expected that using Big Data will become more popular within next 5 years. Due to the explosion of data, coexistency of potential benefit and chaos is highly possible. Thus, many scholars and practitioners have been seeking for a solution to overcome this problem. 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. Thus, it is necessary to seek a reasonable resolution which does not yield a strict restriction on utilizing Big Data. Overall, the current study is to seek a reasonable resolution that use of Big Data and privacy protection can be well-balanced. In fact, private sectors including commercial companies and public sectors are frequently using Big Data. In addition, Big data is closely related to customers and other interesting parties. Nevertheless, the scope of the current study is limited to utilization of Big Data by commercial companies and privacy or personal information protection.