개인정보 관련 민사판례 동향과 전망

It has been 10 years since the Personal Information Protection Act was enacted as a general law on the protection of personal information. In the meantime, large-scale personal information infringement cases have occurred, which has sparked social attention and led to the development of regulations on the use and/or protection of personal information. The recent and major civil decisions of the Supreme Court that have been rendered since 2018 in relation to personal information infringement contain the court's judgment on this matter. Specifically, the cases covered various types of personal information infringement, such as leakage of personal information by hackers, collection of personal information without the consent of the subjects, and leakage of personal information by employees of contract partners. With these actual cases, the characteristics of personal information and the right to informational self-determination can be revealed in a social context rather than a fixed or priori value. As technology advances and the value of data rises, diverse and large amounts of personal data are collected and processed. Accordingly, concerns about large-scale personal information infringement are increasing. It is expected that new types of personal information violations will appear in accordance with changes in data usage, as well as similar cases to existing infringement cases. In such a situation, the role of civil law will be further emphasized compared with the pre-regulatory methods. Therefore, it is necessary to make efforts to find more effective and various protection measures based on an understanding of the actual use and infringement of personal information in the society.