데이터 3법의 주요 개정 내용 및 형사법적 의의에 관한 소고

In January 2020, South Korea’s parliament passed the revision bills of three major data privacy laws(collectively, the ‘Revisions’) intended to ease regulations on the use of personal information. The Revisions largely aim to to arrange the redundant and overlapping data privacy regulations and multiple supervisory bodies to develop a data economy such as MyData industry. This article first summarizes and analyzes the main changes of the Revisions: the clarification of the concept of ‘personal data’ and the introduction of the concept of ‘pseudonymised data’, the strengthening of the personal data protection commission’s status and powers, clarification of the legal basis for analysing and using big data in the finance sector, and ensuring the right to informational self-determination of privacy concerns by introducing the Right to Personal Credit Information Transmission. The second part of this article analyzes the criminal issues of the revisions: improvement of the insufficient definitess of criminal offences on personal information protection by clarifying concept of personal data, the reduction of the criteria of punishment by permitting reasonable use and release of personal data without obtaining data subjects’ consent, and the probability of the wide decriminalization based on the uncertain responsibility of the personal data controller in the rapid big data technology development.