Korea privacy watchdog awards three firms for data protection technology

The Personal Information Protection Commission awarded three companies at its first Personal Information Protection and Utilization Technology Awards on Wednesday, recognizing products that automate or embed privacy safeguards across everyday business systems.

The awards were handed out at the sixth Personal Information Protection Day ceremony, where the commission's chairman presented the prizes. The program was organized jointly with the Korea Internet & Security Agency, the Korea Chief Privacy Officers Council and ZDNet Korea, and a panel of outside experts selected the three winners through document and presentation reviews.

Onae People won for Catchsecu v1.0, an artificial intelligence-based software-as-a-service product that automates management of personal data across its entire lifecycle, from collection to destruction. The commission said the solution lets users without specialized privacy knowledge automatically classify the data they need, generate consent forms and templates that match the purpose of collection, and manage the information securely through encryption and access controls, erasing it beyond recovery once the retention period expires.

NHN Dooray was recognized for Dooray!, an integrated collaboration platform that handles email, electronic approvals, messaging and meetings, with privacy functions built into the product itself. The platform applies data loss prevention controls and links with digital rights management systems that client companies already use, the commission said.

L7 Security submitted ImageOCR & OCR Filtering V3.0, which uses its own optical character recognition engine to extract and block personal information not only from text but also from images and scanned documents. The product screens posts when they are uploaded to a website and checks text and images again when a user downloads a file, according to the commission.

"The achievements of the companies honored today are the result of both their technology and the thorough commitment to personal data protection of the organizations that adopted it," said Lee Sang-min, director general of the commission's personal information policy bureau. "I thank the companies that took an interest in the technology awards and took part, and since this is a system run for the first time this year, we will build on our operating experience and results to develop it into a program that the public and industry can feel."