The South Korean Ministry of Justice provided over 170 million facial recognition photos of foreign nationals and citizens to private companies without consent for developing an AI-powered immigration screening system.
In April 2019, South Korea's Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Science and ICT launched an 'Artificial Intelligence Identification and Tracking System Construction Project' scheduled for completion in 2022. The Ministry of Justice transferred facial images, nationality, gender, and age information collected during immigration screening to the Ministry of Science and ICT, which then provided this data to private companies for AI technology research. Of the facial data transferred, 100 million foreign national images were used for 'AI learning' and 20 million for 'algorithm verification,' while 57.6 million domestic citizen images were also used. The project aimed to develop an advanced immigration screening system using artificial intelligence to automatically identify airport users through CCTV surveillance cameras and detect dangerous situations in real time. Additionally, 88 cameras were installed at Incheon International Airport in 2020, with plans for over 100 more cameras to collect 'real data.' The system was designed for one-to-many facial recognition matching, comparing people captured by cameras against existing databases. Civil rights groups discovered this through National Assembly member Park Joo-min's document requests and called it an 'unprecedented human rights disaster,' arguing it violates South Korea's Personal Information Protection Act as the biometric data was shared without individual consent.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that memorize and leak sensitive personal data or infer private information about individuals without their consent. Unexpected or unauthorized sharing of data and information can compromise user expectation of privacy, assist identity theft, or cause loss of confidential intellectual property.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed