The South Korean government will launch sweeping on-site inspections in the second half of this year as the rapid spread of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud services has spread personal information leak risks across all industries. Sectors handling large-scale sensitive information, such as platforms and financial institutions, will be designated as high-risk groups for concentrated management, while a system mandating personal information protection from the service planning stage will be formally introduced.
The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) announced the "Prevention-Centered Personal Information Management System Transition Plan" containing these measures at the Ministerial Meeting on Economic Affairs held Tuesday. The plan was designed to move away from the previous approach focused on post-incident punishment and to build a prevention-centered system that identifies and blocks leak incidents and infringement risks in advance.
The government will first classify sites into high-, medium-, and low-risk groups by comprehensively considering the scale of personal information processing, data sensitivity, and industry-specific characteristics, and begin differentiated management.
For high-risk groups subject to concentrated inspection in the second half of this year, the inspection areas will be disclosed in advance before regular and ad hoc inspections begin. This year's key inspection targets include platforms, financial institutions, public institutions, edutech, and nursing hospitals, all of which handle large-scale personal information or sensitive information.
For medium- and low-risk sectors, the government will provide self-inspection tools and consulting while actively encouraging the implementation of personal information impact assessments.
Preemptive countermeasures responding to the emergence of new technologies will also be activated. The government will produce a "basic risk map" analyzing data processing status to use in selecting inspection targets, and will continuously monitor infringement concerns in emerging technology areas such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices and agent AI. In addition, in line with the Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) designation reporting system scheduled to be introduced in September, public-private cooperation channels such as a pan-government policy consultative body and a CPO council will be further strengthened.
Incentives and institutional reforms aimed at encouraging voluntary security investment by companies will also proceed in parallel. The "Privacy by Design (PbD) principle," which incorporates personal information protection measures as default values from the planning, design, and development stages of services, will be institutionalized. Along with the dissemination of guidelines, the government plans to reflect the PbD principle in existing evaluation standards such as ISMS-P certification.
In particular, an incentive system will be introduced under which fines will be reduced when companies actively disclose additional security measures or CPO internal control processes through information protection disclosures, and when the effective operation of these measures is confirmed. However, security oversight across the entire supply chain, including software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud services where massive amounts of data are concentrated, is expected to become much stricter than before. For minor legal violations by small and micro businesses, sanctions will be eased when corrected through technical support, helping to bring about substantial improvements in the environment.
The government will also pursue research and development of preventive Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) to prevent personal information leaks and misuse, as well as the cultivation of specialized personnel.
"We will continuously inspect personal information processing practices and vulnerability factors in key sectors in close cooperation with relevant ministries," PIPC Chairperson Song Kyung-hee said. "We will work to firmly establish a prevention-centered management system proportionate to risk levels in the market."
