Users Asked About Personal Information, Received Replies in Chinese... Tesla, DeepSeek and Three Other Companies Receive Improvement Recommendations

[Financial News] Five global businesses received improvement recommendations from the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) after evading inquiries from users in South Korea about the handling of their personal information or responding in foreign languages such as Chinese and English. 
The Personal Information Protection Commission said on the 16th that it had decided at its 19th plenary meeting on the 9th to recommend improvements for five businesses found to require corrective action in a follow-up inspection of the implementation of privacy policy evaluation results.
To support voluntary improvements by companies that received inadequate evaluations last year, the PIPC notified each company of its evaluation results. It also provided tailored on-site support by having experts who participated in the evaluations visit the workplaces of companies that applied for assistance. The PIPC said the inspection confirmed overall improvements.

However, some companies were still found to lack basic measures. 
Tesla Korea and DeepSeek responded to inquiries from users in South Korea in English and Chinese, respectively. Wrtn Technologies, a South Korean artificial intelligence (AI) service company, did not respond to users’ inquiries about exercising their personal-information rights.
The PIPC recommended that these three businesses improve their operating systems so that requests from South Korean consumers to exercise their rights can be received and processed smoothly.
OpenAI and Nike were also found to have failed to respond to email inquiries after users contacted them by phone about personal information and were directed to submit their questions by email. In response, the PIPC called for stronger management and oversight to ensure that personal-information complaints and consultations are handled smoothly through domestic representatives.
Additional shortcomings were identified, including discrepancies between the legal grounds for processing stated in the privacy policies and the actual processing methods, complicated access routes to the policies, and the failure to disclose previous versions of the policies. The PIPC plans to notify the relevant organizations individually of the inspection results and have them make improvements on their own.
Ko Nak-jun, director of preventive mediation deliberation at the PIPC, said, "We will strengthen follow-up inspections and tailored support so that privacy policy evaluations lead not merely to assessments but to substantive improvements in the level of personal-information protection," adding, "We will also continue to inspect and improve areas where data subjects are unable to exercise their rights smoothly."



[email protected] Lee Gu-soon Reporter