The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) on the 23rd disclosed that it decided to impose a penalty surcharge on global big tech companies TikTok and an Apple affiliate for collecting and using personal information without a lawful basis. The penalty surcharge is 10.36 billion won for TikTok and 252 million won for Apple.
Coincidentally, this is the day when Minister Kim Jung-kwan of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources attends the opening ceremony of the Korea-U.S. Shipbuilding Cooperation Center in Washington, D.C., and meets key figures in the U.S. administration and Congress, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. President Lee Jae-myung will also begin a trip a day later, on the 24th, starting in San Francisco, home to Silicon Valley. As the record penalty surcharge imposed over Coupang's massive personal information leak has become a fuse for Korea-U.S. friction, some are interpreting the move as an attempt to convey the message that "Korea neither indiscriminately cracks down on nor goes easy on global corporations."
Among the sanctions announced that day, TikTok stands out in particular. That is because it is similar to the issue that accounted for 200.11 billion won of the 624.681 billion won penalty surcharge imposed on Coupang last month. TikTok provided advertising and content performance analytics services and distributed behavioral information collection tools to more than 71,000 corporations in Korea, collecting users' click, purchase, and search records on third-party websites and apps where the tool was installed. It linked this to member accounts along with device identifiers to infer interests and used the data for targeted advertising. This involved 9.45 million people, based on active users in Korea. It mirrors the method by which Coupang, through "Coupang Partners," combined the online activity records of 11.17 million people on third-party platforms with device identifiers and member numbers and stored them in an advertising database. The applicable provision is also the same, Article 15, Paragraph 1 of the Personal Information Protection Act.
However, looking only at the outcomes, the gap appears large. Coupang's penalty surcharge for the infringement portion was 200.11 billion won, while TikTok's was 10.36 billion won—nearly a 20-fold difference. The methods and scale are similar, but the dispositions differ, which could give the impression that "only Coupang was targeted." The PIPC's position is that this is a kind of optical illusion caused by a large difference in related domestic revenue. In fact, for Coupang, the PIPC determined that the purpose of operating Partners was to attract users and increase e-commerce sales, so it used total online shopping sales as the basis.
The 252 million won imposed on Apple, a U.S. corporation, may also seem at first glance like a "slap on the wrist." The Apple case involves using voice recordings collected when users used the voice assistant "Siri," and the transcripts converted from those recordings, to improve services without consent, with violations dating back to 2019. At that time, before personal information protection rules were transferred to the Personal Information Protection Act, the old Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection, then under the jurisdiction of the Korea Media and Communications Commission (now the Korea Media and Communications Commission), applied. In addition, because Siri is a free service and related sales could not be calculated, a fixed-amount penalty surcharge standard was applied. The fixed-amount penalty surcharge cap under the old Network Act applied to Apple is 400 million won, lower than the current 2 billion won cap under the Personal Information Protection Act. It is also understood that the violation had already ended and that Apple voluntarily took corrective steps during the investigation, such as offering an opt-in choice for transcript use.
◇ PIPC: "No discrimination between domestic and foreign corporations"
Earlier, on the 1st of this month, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, in an interim report framed as "Korea's discriminatory attack," took issue with the Coupang penalty surcharge, saying it "far exceeds the fines imposed on Korean corporations that caused more serious leaks." The White House also joined in, saying "Coupang has become a target of the Lee Jae-myung administration."
Looking only at the amounts, other global corporations appear to have received lighter dispositions compared with Coupang. At first glance, the claim that "only Coupang is being discriminated against" seems to fit. However, upon closer look, the same provisions and the same calculation methods were applied to the same types of violations, and the differences in amounts stem from revenue scale and the gravity of the issues, the PIPC explained. The PIPC specified in its press release that it would "respond strictly without discrimination between domestic and foreign corporations."
Some interpret this as a signal reaffirming the principle of neither overlooking nor targeting based on nationality. An IT industry source said, "It does not mean they crack down on every U.S. corporation; it should be read as sanctions that signal a reasonable judgment depending on the case and its gravity," adding, "It is hard to see as mere coincidence that the PIPC announcement on global big tech coincided with President Lee's and Minister Kim's itineraries in the U.S."