Republic of Korea: Fined Scatterlab Inc for violations of Personal Information Protection Act in developing AI chatbot "Iruda"

On 28 April 2021, the Republic of Korea Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) fined Scatterlab Inc., the developer of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot system Iruda, KRW 103.3 million (USD 92'900) for eight violations of the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). This follows PIPC's official investigation into complaints from users of discriminatory, racist, and homophobic language from the AI chatbot. The investigation found that Scatterlab violated the PIPA by using AI training data from messages on popular South Korean app KakaoTalk without pseudonymisation, posted its AI models on code-sharing platform Github without removing identifiable information from messaging data, and did not seek users' explicit consent for the use of their personal information in developing Iruda.