In the era of big data, the medical and industrial worlds are making great efforts to utilize medical information based on various technologies. Of course, it is true that the government has a positive attitude towards the use of information to pioneer new industrial fields in the era of great change called the 4th Industrial Revolution. However, compared to general personal information, the need for protection is required at a high level in that the degree of damage to the information subject is much greater in case of infringement of medical information. For this reason, the protection and utilization of medical information are often perceived as contradictory or difficult to coexist like two sides of a coin.
In February 2020, the Personal Information Protection Act was revised, and through this, the contents of ‘pseudonymized information’ were newly established. This is defined as ‘information that cannot identify a specific individual without the use or combination of additional information to restore personal information to its original state by pseudonymizing it’. However, there is a possibility that pseudonymous information can be technically restored as personal information, and in this case, if an infringement of personal information occurs, an issue may be raised about how to solve it. In particular, when pseudonymized medical information is restored, it can cause serious infringement on government entities.
On the other hand, Korea has been discussing for a long time since the introduction of the right to request transmission in Article 20 of the GDPR of the EU, and the right to request transmission of personal information was newly regulated with the revision of the Personal Information Protection Act in 2023. This right can request companies and institutions that hold their personal information to transfer that information to another place, which is one of the core rights of information subjects necessary to implement My Data. However, if the patient, the subject of information, requests to transmit his or her medical information to another institution, a problem of information leakage may occur.
In this paper, we look at the provisions of pseudonymous information and the right to request personal information transmission in terms of personal information utilization in our personal information protection law and similar contents in China’s personal information protection law, and try to find implications for the development of our law.