The nameplate of the Personal Information Protection Commission. [Personal Information Protection Commission]
The nameplate of the Personal Information Protection Commission. [Personal Information Protection Commission]

Questions over the fairness of the panel that deliberates fines at the Personal Information Protection Commission have drawn fire once again.

It has emerged that a PIPC commissioner affiliated with Kim & Chang took part in the deliberation of a fine imposed on Kakao. Kim & Chang is now representing Kakao in a lawsuit challenging that fine.

The PIPC maintains there was no problem because Kim & Chang was not Kakao's legal representative at the time the fine was deliberated. However, the law firm of a commissioner who was deeply involved in the deliberation process has since appeared as Kakao's counsel, placing the commission in an uncomfortable position in the ongoing litigation.

Lawmakers in the National Assembly have already called on the PIPC to expand its conflict-of-interest checks beyond individual commissioners to include the case intake of their affiliated law firms.

According to materials obtained Wednesday from the office of Rebuilding Korea Party lawmaker Kim Hyong-yeon, Commissioner Lee of the PIPC — an attorney at Kim & Chang — participated in the May 2024 deliberation that resulted in a fine of approximately 15.1 billion won ($11.4 million) against Kakao for a personal data leak.

The PIPC had earlier investigated whether Kakao violated the Personal Information Protection Act amid allegations that personal data of KakaoTalk open-chat users was being traded illegally.

The investigation found that a hacker had exploited a vulnerability in open chat rooms to obtain participant data, then used KakaoTalk's friend-adding feature and illicit programs to gather user information and combine it with member serial numbers to create a personal data file. The breach involved 65,718 records.

The issue is that Commissioner Lee sat on the panel that deliberated the fine against Kakao. In November 2024, Kakao filed an administrative lawsuit seeking to overturn the corrective order and other sanctions and retained Kim & Chang as its legal representative. The arrangement effectively put Kim & Chang on both sides of the table.

Concerns about the PIPC's fine-deliberation process have grown this year as the commission has handed down a string of record-breaking fines.

Critics say the PIPC has brought the fairness controversy on itself. The commission has continued to appoint attorneys affiliated with Kim & Chang — current and former — as commissioners, giving companies ever more reason to hire the firm when contesting PIPC fines in court.

"It is as if the referee and the player are on the same team when the law firm of a commissioner who deliberated a sanction goes on to represent the company fighting that very sanction," Kim said. "The PIPC must expand its conflict-of-interest checks to cover not just individual commissioners but also the case intake of their affiliated law firms."

Kim added that the commission should also tighten the standards for appointing commissioners and for recusal to address fairness concerns in cases where a deliberation is followed by a litigation retainer.


ko@heraldcorp.com