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SK Telecom (photo = provided by SK Telecom) |
[Alpha Biz= Reporter Kim Minyoung] SK Telecom's e-prescription service, which operated from 2012 to 2015, has been deemed lawful by the Supreme Court of South Korea. The court ruled that SK Telecom merely acted as an intermediary, transmitting information from hospitals to pharmacies, and therefore did not illegally handle personal data.
On August 8, the legal community reported that the Supreme Court's Second Division, led by Justice Lee Dong-won, recently upheld a lower court's ruling that acquitted SK Telecom and three of its executives of charges related to violations of the Personal Information Protection Act and the Medical Service Act.
SK Telecom launched a mobile e-prescription application in February 2012, allowing doctors' prescriptions to be electronically sent to pharmacists for medication dispensing. Patients could also input a barcode from a paper prescription into the app to directly access and manage their medication information.
However, concerns arose in 2014 with the enactment of the Personal Information Protection Act. SK Telecom's service automatically encrypted and stored prescription data on its intermediary server when participating hospitals or clinics issued prescriptions. The data would then be sent to pharmacies upon the patient's request.
Prosecutors argued that the storage of this data on SK Telecom's servers without explicit consent from hospitals or patients constituted illegal data collection and transmission. They charged SK Telecom in July 2015 with unlawfully storing and transmitting 78 million pieces of personal data. The service was discontinued in March 2015 during the ongoing investigation.
Despite the prosecution's claims, both the lower courts and the Supreme Court ruled that SK Telecom's service did not violate the law. The courts found that the service was merely acting as an intermediary and did not illegally acquire or leak personal information.
The courts also found no violation of the Medical Service Act. The first instance court explained that the act of "detecting" information, as prohibited by the Medical Service Act, involves accessing and understanding personal data. Since SK Telecom's service encrypted the data during transmission and only temporarily stored it before sending it to pharmacies, where it was decrypted, the court concluded that this did not constitute illegal data detection.
Prosecutors had argued that comparing the prescription data stored on the intermediary server with data held by the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service could identify individuals, but the courts did not find this argument sufficient to establish guilt.
AlphaBIZ Kim Minyoung(kimmy@alphabiz.co.kr)
