Legal Issues Regarding Smart City and Personal Information Protection

초록

As a new growth engine of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a smart city, “A sustainable city that solves the problem of urbanization and improves the quality of life by combining high-tech information and communication technology with existing architectural and civil engineering technologies and urban infrastructure”, is emerging. Smart cities are based on personal information rather than traditional urban infrastructure such as roads and buildings. Therefore, the key legal issue in smart cities is the legitimate processing of personal information. However, the smart city law does not have any practical stipulations on how to handle personal information legitimately and how to protect personal information. In short, the smart city law was named ‘smart’, but it is a ‘non-smart’ law that entrusts everything to the existing personal information protection legal system. Due to the technical and social environment of the smart city, it is difficult to obtain the consent of the information subject, and even in accordance with the current personal information protection law, there is a limit in legally processing personal information in the smart city. In other words, the current legal system does not guarantee the processing of legitimate personal information in smart cities, and as a result, violations of the actual law are virtually neglected. This paper analyzes the overseas legal systems of the United States, Japan, and the European Union based on the awareness of these problems, and then proposes ways to improve the legal system as follows. First, it is necessary to fundamentally convert the current opt-in personal information protection law system to an opt-out method in which the information subject can exert management control afterward. Second, in order to prevent legislative gaps before converting the system to opt-out, the smart city law or the personal information protection law should be partially revised to provide an institutional basis that is consistent with the reality of personal information processing in smart cities. Third, it is necessary to introduce ‘privacy by design’ concept that reflects on the development of products and services in consideration of personal information protection issues from the design stage in a flexible discipline method.

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