Korea's privacy watchdog awards 20 teams in pseudonymized data contest

The Personal Information Protection Commission said Wednesday it awarded 20 teams a total of 24.5 million won ($18,036) at its 2026 pseudonymized data competition, the largest edition of the contest since it began.

The competition drew 123 entries from public institutions, local governments, companies and academia — 27 in the best-practice category and 96 in the idea category. An outside panel of experts selected 17 best-practice teams and three idea teams as winners.

The top prize in the best-practice category went to a Korea Expressway Corp. team that analyzed about 15.43 million toll records from 2025 to study drivers who exit a highway interchange and re-enter the same one within 20 minutes. Roughly 90 percent of those vehicles re-entered three times or fewer a year. Based on the findings, the operator will waive basic tolls for re-entries within 15 minutes, up to three times a year, starting in October 2026 — a change the commission said would ease about 6.8 billion won ($5.01 million) in annual toll costs based on 2025 traffic volumes.

A joint team from the Korea SMEs and Startups Agency and the Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service combined about 250,000 subscriber records from a state savings program with about 28.37 million employment insurance records. Subscribers stayed at their jobs 2.34 times longer on average than non-subscribers, and participating companies posted a 14.8 percentage-point higher increase in headcount, a 4.8 percentage-point higher gain in value added per worker and a 3.9 percentage-point higher rise in operating profit. The agency used the results to expand the program and provide new asset-building support to 33,000 small-business workers.

Another grand prize went to a team from the National Institute of Forest Science, Seoul National University, Gyeongsang National University and the Korea Forestry Promotion Institute, which linked about 440,000 people's health insurance and medical records with about 26.47 million GPS-tracked hiking and walking records from a private platform. Tracking 32,737 people over 120,257 person-years, the researchers found the most active hikers had a roughly 10 to 11 percent lower risk of developing a new mental illness than non-hikers.

A team from the Korea Industrial Complex Corp. combined about 330,000 location records from LG Uplus with about 450,000 consumption records from Samsung Card to analyze worker movement and spending in industrial parks. The analysis proposed three new shuttle bus stops in areas with poor public transit access and called for more youth-friendly convenience stores and cafes. The findings fed into the selection of a 53 billion won ($39 million) industrial park program.

In the idea category, a team from Seoul Women's University proposed an AI service that links six agencies' data — 14 data types in all — to calculate a "caregiving bankruptcy risk score" and flag households at risk of financial crisis from long-term care burdens, referring them to emergency welfare, catastrophic medical expense, long-term care and employment support programs.

"The more the AI transformation accelerates, the more the pseudonymized data system is a practical solution that allows quality data to be used fully while protecting personal information safely," commission Chairperson Song Kyoung-hee said. She added that the commission is revising its pseudonymization guidelines to simplify procedures and paperwork according to risk levels and shorten processing times, and that it will keep improving the system so this year's winning cases lead to better public services and industrial innovation.