‘Child and Adolescent Digital Right to Be Forgotten Pilot Project’
Helping cases where identity verification is difficult due to lack of ID for face videos uploaded carelessly in childhood
"I am being teased by my friends because of a video I uploaded on YouTube when I was in elementary school, but I can't find the password, so I feel helpless."
About 3,500 people have used the "Children and Adolescents' Digital Right to be Forgotten Pilot Project" service within two months of its launch, which supports children and adolescents who want to delete or hide posts they uploaded online when they were young. This service helps delete posts containing personal information such as texts, photos, and videos posted online during the period when the user was under 18 years old. Many applicants who had difficulty proving ownership of their posts due to lack of identification cards applied.
The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) disclosed on the 2nd the analysis results of 3,488 applications submitted by June 30, marking two months since the launch of the "Digital Right to be Forgotten Pilot Project." Among all applications, the age group with the highest number of applicants was 15 years old, with a total of 652 applications. Looking at the age groups, those aged 16 to 18 (high school students) accounted for 37% of the total applications. In contrast, the application rate of adults aged 19 to 24 was the lowest at 30%.
In many cases, applicants had posted their photos, videos, phone numbers, etc., in the past but had difficulty deleting the posts because they left the site without deleting them. For example, applicant A posted a message including their phone number on a fan cafe of a favorite singer several years ago. After leaving the fan cafe, they recently found that the posts from the fan cafe still appeared in portal site searches. However, since they had left the cafe, they did not have the authority to delete the posts and thus applied for the service.
Many cases involved losing accounts created during childhood, and children and adolescents without identification cards had difficulty proving ownership of their posts. In such cases, through this pilot project, the process involved consultation with a manager → supplementing proof of ownership → requesting the business operator, resulting in post deletion and exclusion from search listings. For posts showing faces, proof of ownership was required with a photo taken from the front of the face, and if a phone number was exposed, confirmation was done through a billing statement.
So far, the sites with the most deletion requests were YouTube, Facebook, Naver, TikTok, and Instagram, in that order. Although children and adolescents have been actively engaged in online activities centered on video sharing platforms, communities, and social networking services (SNS) since preschool age, their awareness of the risks of personal information exposure is not high. Therefore, the PIPC reports that many posts uploaded carelessly contained a large amount of personal information.
Lee Jeong-ryeol, Secretary-General of the PIPC, said, "As nearly 3,500 children and adolescents applied within two months of the service launch, the 'Children and Adolescents' Digital Right to be Forgotten Pilot Project' is a project that supports the exercise of personal information control rights that the public can genuinely feel." He added, "We will continue to regularly review the operation status and achievements of the service and improve it so that more children and adolescents can use this service."
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