Korea privacy watchdog signals AI-era overhaul after citizens back flexible consent

The Personal Information Protection Commission said Thursday that almost nine in 10 participants at a public forum on artificial intelligence and personal data want the country's privacy rules changed, and that it will draw up reform measures this year based on the views gathered.

At the Nov. 1 event at Yonsei University in Seoul, co-hosted with the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, 89.7 percent of attendees answered on-site that the system needs change. Of those, 60.5 percent said the existing framework should be kept but supplemented with rules suited to the AI era, while 29.2 percent called for the basic framework to be rebuilt.

The forum put an unusually concrete question to the 195 participants selected by open recruitment: if a service genuinely needs personal data, how should that be handled? Twenty of the 25 discussion groups, or 80 percent, preferred a "tell them in advance and let them stop anytime" approach over asking for consent each time, arguing that repeated consent prompts become a formality that offers no real protection and slow responses in emergencies and public-interest cases. Any such approach must come with a firmly guaranteed right to refuse, they added. The four groups, or 16 percent, that favored asking for consent every time cited fears of data leaks and misuse and a lack of trust in AI companies. One group was evenly split.

Earlier online discussions pointed the same way. Of 1,333 people who took part in a two-week session from Oct. 15 to 29, 88 percent said they had clicked through repeated consent requests as a formality, and 94 percent said clear notice and the ability to refuse at any time matter more than advance consent. Ninety percent supported stricter handling for data such as health and financial records, where a leak does serious harm, and looser treatment for less sensitive information.

Participants also assigned responsibility beyond the regulator. In the on-site survey, 75.4 percent named companies' duty to check risks and protect data as the most important element of safe use, and 74.9 percent chose the government's role in setting standards and supervising compliance.

Speakers at the forum challenged the country's reliance on consent. Kim Do-seung, a professor at Jeonbuk National University's law school, walked through the history of the Personal Information Protection Act and the legal grounds for processing data other than consent, stressing that adding more consent requests does not by itself strengthen protection. Kim Byung-pil, a professor at KAIST's business school, described how AI combines conversation histories with information from outside services and argued that the existing consent system has limits in agent-based AI environments.

The commission said it will reflect the views from the forum, along with public suggestions submitted in August, in a package of institutional reforms to be prepared within the year to protect privacy rights in practice while allowing companies and institutions to use personal data responsibly.

The interior ministry, which co-hosted the forum, will hold the fourth edition on Nov. 26 on building a society where no one is left isolated, with applications open through its website and online public communication channel.