4차 산업혁명시대 개인정보권의 법리적 재검토

In the past, the term 'privacy', was used to describe the concept of freedom from the prying eyes of others or the public but activities of individuals in the socio-economic society have grown in scope so much that it has become necessary to protect certain aspects arising from such activities which take place in the 'public domain', and this term has also grown to cover the active rights to control one's own information or the right to informational self-determination in today's highly informatized age. As societies evolve and develop, the underlying technology development also allows the identification of each individual with non-private and public information. In today's age where an individual's socio-economic activities depend on providing consent to the use of one's personal information to receive various services, such footprints of an individual that allow the identification of an individual are now treated as personal information. While personal information includes the truly private information that fall into the intimate area not for sharing, there are also information that can be processed and used for economic benefits with the consent of its owner. In the former case, we must also consider the legal rights of the lawful acquirer of such personal information and cannot simply restrict the use of such lawfully acquired information on the basis of informational self-determinism. In the age of the fourth industrial revolution where the innovative data processing technology is changing the industrial paradigm from 'mass production and mass consumption' to 'customized production and customized consumption', the use and processing of personal information is unavoidable. A neutral concept of the 'personal information rights' may be introduced to balance the control of own's personal information and its use by the society. However, the current legal framework on personal information protection is mainly focused on formally securing the rights to self-determinism and except for extremely rare cases of exception, the use and processing of personal information without prior consent is largely regarded as illegal and subject to civil, criminal and administrative penalties under the opt-in policy. Such policy is for protecting personal information in the intimate and private area that must be respected and inviolable, but too restrictive for personal information that can be used freely for economic advantage. Furthermore, this kind of policy may also provide legal excuse to personal information pocessors who take advantage of consent provided by their owner almost automatically since the repetitive provision of consent for use of such personal information may blind the owners to what they are agreeing to. In order to resolve these issues, an understanding on the properties of personal information such as the truly private and intimate or the economic characteristics, must be built so that the proper regulations can be setup to provide the needed protection for the diverse cases possible. The mechanisms for resolving this problem can be presented as follows: first, restructure the current regulations from its formal procedural compliance for acquiring prior consent to actual and reasonable personal information processing based on the situation during the provision of consent or based on the expectation of the owner of the private information that is being processed; second, considering the limitation of enforcing the regulations for private information protection based on one single general law, the Personal Information Protection Act, make the transition to a system where the protection of personal information is carried out by diverse individual laws responsible for each industrial sector to take the characteristics of each industry into account.