While increasing numbers of private companies use big data as a marketing tool, governments seek to ways using accumulated statistics for good purposes in society. The Korean government is an example in point. It prioritizes fostering the ‘Creative Industry’ leveraging science and technology as its national economic growth strategy. The heart of the growth strategy is to expand public and private services by making full use of big data, High Performance Computing, etc., and to promote the service industry as a whole. In late 2012, the President's Council on National ICT Strategy made public its ‘Master Plan on Utilizing Big Data to Realize Smart Nation.’ Under the plan, the council selected 16 projects in 6 sectors including safety, welfare, national economy, infrastructure, industrial support, and science and technology. Among them, the government sets out the project for utilizing big data analytics to predict crime.
In Los Angeles, the police department undertook a pilot project in applying an algorithm model to predict the areas where crime is likely to occur. The early result from the pilot project showed that the accuracy of its crime prediction was high and early prediction was contributed to decrease in crime. Based on the results it could say that effectiveness of crime prevention could be enhanced further by reassigning patrols to hotspots and prevent crime before it happens. It could assume that big data has great potential to prevent numerous types of crimes; criminal traffic offences with traffic data analytics, illegal distribution of personal information by analyzing data transmitted over the Internet, insurance fraud, and so on. In addition to predicting crime, big data could be helpful to respond to crimes which already occurred in a way of feeding a big data model with data on criminals such as DNA index system.
On the other hand, harnessing big data raises a number of serious privacy concerns. At the same time, it is also argued that user’s fundamental right of informational self-determination is undermined. Given privacy concerns in the digital age, privacy-related issues, like misuse of personal information and a new way to protect privacy, should be dealt with. To this end, it is required to keep up with changes in technologies and paradigm of information use and then establish institutional framework.
In a digital society where most personal activities both online and offline are recorded and stored, anonymity is no longer maintained. In other words, people are losing their control on informational self-determination. Considering the fact that s in digital form could be stored permanently at a low cost and could be retrieved easily, it is hard to define the scope of institutional responsibility of words and activities. Conscience that is the undisclosed inner part of a human being is observed closely and invaded by power. Therefore a person is needed to constantly self-censor at the highest level. Using big data as a large scale might lead to serious violation of privacy. That is the reason why paradigm shift is needed to discuss norms of privacy reflecting changes in our society.
As intimate personal information is consistently exposed on one’s own free will or against it, much emphasis is putting on the right to be forgotten which includes, the right to ask service providers to delete the personal information, the notion of not to be searched, and extinctive preion of information. From the view point of criminal justice, research should be carried out to assess advantages and disadvantages of using big data for crime prevention, define the nature and scope of the right to be forgotten as legally protected interest(the concept of Rechtsgut). In addition, what should be examined is whether it is possible to implement any institutional measures that enforce deletion of person information or deny access to it under the framework of criminal justice. Little research has been conducted on the scope of limiting the right to be forgotten for the purpose of crime prevention. Until now, there is no study or research that suggests criminal policies regarding those issues in Korea.
To serve this purpose, this study reviews overseas practices, a wide range of issues and limits to use big data for crime prevention on technologies, criminal policies, cultural and social challenges. Then it examines ways to adapt successful practices to Korea. The study also looks into domestic research, report, publication about building big data system in Korea, centering on crime prevention. The focus of this study is to minimize invasion of privacy caused by using big data and to present upside and down side of it.