According to the report of the Korea Information Security Agency (KISA), the number of infringement cases of personal information has reached 18,206 in 2005, and as of the end of October this year it already stands at 19,426. If we analyze the contents of personal information infringement, we can find that the most frequent case is the illegal use of other people's resident registration numbers, followed by the misuse of credit information, collection of personal information without agreement, provision of personal information without agreement, no response to the request for agreement withdrawal, and lack of technical measures. Only 35 cases among the 19,426 reported to the authorities have been solved. The order of correction has been given to 29 companies, and penalty has been imposed on 6 companies.
After a 100-day fact-finding survey, the National Policy Agency has detected 21 million cases of personal information leakage. In fact, this means that we are living in a flood of personal information leakage. This brings huge economic damages and image losses on the companies, let alone individual persons. Because of the misuse of personal information related to the online game Lineage, 8,500 users have filed a class action lawsuit against NCSOFT. Eleven thousand cases of individual resident registration numbers have been exposed from the homepages of 41 public organizations. From the site of e-government, 100,000 copies of residential registration papers have been issued in an improper manner. All these are staining the credibility of the government.
Personal information protection badly needed
Along with increasing IT services including Internet, position tracking, telematics, and electronic resident cards, the infringement of individual privacy is expected to increase steadily. The more we use these services, the broader the scope of personal information becomes. It begins to include to not only the name and resident registration number, but also to the information on one's location, personal biological details, and even ideas.
Therefore, the problem of information security carries a significant meaning in order to build the reliability and credibility of knowledge and information, consequently reducing the exchange costs of the whole society. In the past security has been emphasized from the aspect of network systems, but nowadays security should focus on the problems stemming from the infringement of personal information. Accordingly, all IT devices are required to take into consideration the problem of security from the beginning stage of new product development.
Each individual has to make more efforts to protect his own personal information while trying to observe basic user rules. Each company has to strengthen its technical protection measures including establishing a security server. It also must implement administrative protection measures such as appointing a manager in charge of personal information. More importantly, the government must improve the laws and systems related to personal information protection, while on an ongoing basis checking the reality of information protection in the business community.
