Data Industry and Legislations for Personal Information Protection

Data-driven industry across all sectors is heavily dependent on the use of personal information in order to create business values to gain competitive edge, thus calling for tighter laws and regulations on collecting, using, and disseminating of personal information. Even in the public e-government domain, the use of personal information of each citizen is required for better policy formulation to benefit citizens. The promotion of the data-driven economy or the enhancement of e-government citizen services directly conflict with the goal of personal information protection laws to preserve an individual right as the data owner. Faced with these conflicting goals, the purpose of legislation on protection of personal information, in end, becomes the effort to strike a balance between the protection of the information owner and the use of such information for economic gain or the public good. Balancing between regulatory efforts by the government to govern emerging new technological advances for economic and service promotions and the original goal of protecting personal information for privacy requires learning from diverse experiences, multi-faceted perspectives and contextual practices. This workshop aims to discuss and examine existing and emerging legislations of other countries and to identify the common basic requirements to consider and contextual and cultural differences as well as how the legislations are enforced in practice. We focus on delegates of scholars, entrepreneurs and policy makers from Korea who are interested in comparative analysis in the field of legislations for protection of personal information, followed by active discussions and exchange of ideas with the participation of experts from Europe, Japan and USA.