A bill amending the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) would create a new "consent decree" (동의의결) procedure, adding Articles 64-3 through 64-6. Under the proposal, a data controller under investigation for a PIPA violation — for example, following a data leak — could itself propose remedial and restorative measures, and if the regulator finds the proposal adequate, the investigation could be closed without further sanctions, rather than proceeding through a full enforcement action or litigation. The bill was referred to the competent committee and moved into committee review on 26 August 2026; no effective date, applicability threshold, or penalty has been set, and it remains a pending proposal rather than current law.

The bill's stated background cites recent large-scale personal-data leaks — including a reported 33.7 million member-record leak at a major e-commerce company, and breaches at telecom carriers and financial firms — and notes that individual victims have rarely obtained practical compensation through the existing collective-dispute-mediation and class-action mechanisms, largely because per-victim losses are too small to justify the time and cost of pursuing a claim.

What this means for you

  • No action is required now. This is a bill under committee review, not an enacted law; there is no effective date, threshold, or penalty yet to plan around.
  • Track committee progress if you handle Korean personal data at scale. If enacted, the consent-decree mechanism would give a data controller under PIPA investigation a route to propose its own remediation and close the matter without further sanction — relevant to how you would respond to a future breach investigation in Korea.
  • Do not assume this changes your current breach-response or notification obligations. Existing PIPA duties (breach notification, the domestic-representative duty under Article 31-2, etc.) are unaffected by this bill as drafted.
  • Revisit this if the bill advances. A move from committee review to a floor vote, or a change to the proposed Articles 64-3–64-6, would be the next milestone worth checking against your compliance and incident-response planning.

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