Personal Information Protection Commission Holds 1st Startup Challenge Awards Ceremony

[Asia Economy Reporter Eunmo Koo] The Personal Information Protection Commission announced that on the 14th, it held the ‘Personal Information Protection and Utilization Technology Development Startup Challenge Awards Ceremony’ at Comtrue Technology in Sangam-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul, together with the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA).

The Startup Challenge was an event aimed at discovering emerging and small businesses with excellent technologies to enhance personal information protection or safely utilize personal information. A total of three companies, including Comtrue Technology, were selected.

Comtrue Technology, which won the grand prize, the Chairman’s Award of the Personal Information Protection Commission, proposed a technology that automatically classifies documents such as identification cards and major certificates that are highly likely to contain personal information based on artificial intelligence (AI) and de-identifies the personal information. The Excellence Awards, the Korea Internet & Security Agency Director’s Awards, were given to Datas and SensTone. Datas proposed an integrated management technology for pseudonymization and anonymization measures that supports the entire pseudonymization process, including pseudonymized target identification, re-identification risk assessment, and synthetic data generation. SensTone proposed an IoT-based smart authentication technology using OTAC (One-Time Authentication Code).

The Personal Information Protection Commission secured 3 billion KRW as a new research and development (R&D) budget for next year to actively support personal information protection and utilization technology development. It plans to continuously invest R&D budgets in excellent technologies that support personal information protection and safe utilization in response to new technological changes.

After the awards ceremony, during the ‘Personal Information Talk Relay,’ representatives from the three startup challenge award-winning companies and the CEO of CryptoLab, a small but strong company in the cryptography field specializing in homomorphic encryption and post-quantum cryptography, participated to introduce personal information protection technologies and discuss R&D directions.

Yoon Jong-in, Chairman of the Personal Information Protection Commission, said, “As the control tower for personal information protection, the Commission plans to establish systems for effective protection of personal information and expand technology development, dissemination, and support that underpin these systems. To this end, the Commission has newly secured 3 billion KRW for personal information protection technology development in the next year’s budget and will continue to support core technologies to maintain a balance between personal information protection and utilization.”