August 20, 2025
(This is an unofficial translation of a press release, originally prepared in Korean.)
The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) held the 4th Future Privacy Forum on Wednesday, August 20, 2025. The forum consists of forty experts across diverse domains, ranging from industry to civil society, to serve as a platform for personal information protection policy to explore future agendas in the privacy landscape and gather inputs.
The 4th forum focused on the recent trends in privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), digital trade, and other key agendas in the privacy landscape to shape the future.
First up, Commissioner Daeseon Choi opened the session by showcasing research underway at the Soongsil University AI Safety Center. He highlighted the center’s project on PETs, including:
● Noise injection technologies, which inject noise/distortions into unobfuscated images or voice recordings to prevent the generation of content powered by Deepfakes or Deepvoices
● On-device AI technologies, in which data is generated and processed locally on a device itself, such as smartphones and autonomous vehicles, rather than relying on cloud servers.
Following the presentation by Commissioner Choi, a special presentation was delivered by Kyu Yub Lee, head of the New Trade Strategy Team of the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP), under the theme of “Pending Issues and Policy Implications in the Korea-U.S. Digital Trade”. He shared various stakeholders’ perspectives toward cross-border transfers of personal information, as well as the data-related issues and challenges in digital trade. He stressed the importance of data protection authorities setting mid-to-long-term digital trade policy directions that take into account evolving data policies and digital technologies in the United States, the European Union, and other major economies.
To address and rise above challenges, the PIPC is going to strengthen international cooperation in the field of data protection and privacy to facilitate digital trade by establishing safe cross-border data transfer frameworks with the U.S. and other major countries and expanding cross-border data transfer means. The adoption of standard contractual clauses (SCCs), a tool for compliance with regard to cross-border data transfers, is one of the prominent endeavors of the PIPC. SCCs impose obligations on both parties, ensuring that the data is handled in a way that respects data subjects.