Abstract
The recently revised "Telecommunications Business Promotion and Personal Data Protection Act" is an important legal milestone in promoting the Korean telecommunications infrastructure and industry as well as protecting individuals' personal data and individuals' rights to privacy. Special characteristics of information security and privacy protection services including public goods' feature, adaptiveness, relativity, multi-dimensionality, and incompleteness, are reviewed. The responsibility of chief security/privacy officers in the IT industry, and the fairness and effectiveness of the criminal negligence in the Telecommunications Act are analyzed. An assessment of the rationale behind the act as well as a survey of related laws and cases in different countries, offers the following recommendations : i) revise the act and develop new systems for data protection, ii) grant a stay of execution or reduce the sentence given extenuating circumstances, or iii) use technical and managerial measures in data protection for exemption from criminal negligence.