코로나19 시대의 개인정보보호방안에 관한 연구

A Study on Personal Information Protection Measures in the Covid-19 Era

Personal information and health information on Covid-19 patient of an infectious disease and person suspected of contracting an infectious disease are disclosed in accordance with Article 6 and Article 34-2 of the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act, and also the rights of the subject of personal information are excluded by Article 58 (1) 3 of the Personal Information Protection Act, even if the information is private data. So, the personal information of a patient of an infectious disease does not actually fall into the area of privacy protection. Consequently, this allows the state to obtain private information and that information is located outside the protected area of the Personal Information Protection Act. Eventually, conflict arises between the two laws: Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act that aims to improve the health of the people by stipulating the prevention and management of infectious diseases, and Personal Information Protection Act that aims to protect individual freedoms and rights and to realize individual dignity and values. Recognizing these issues, this article studied how personal information protection should be handled in a national disaster situation caused by an infectious disease. To this end, we researched the applicable provisions on the processing of personal information in national emergency situations such as Covid-19 (Ⅱ), reviewed, from a constitutional perspective, the regulations on the processing of personal information of citizens other than patient of an infectious disease and person suspected of contracting an infectious disease (Ⅲ), proposed a desirable method of handling public health information such as infectious diseases after reviewing the European Personal Information Protection Act, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which had the greatest impact on the amendment of the Personal Information Protection Act (Ⅳ), and finally researched how to best protect the rights of the subject of the personal information in national disasters such as Covid-19 (Ⅴ).