Precision medicine often requires third-party access to personal data for the precise targeting of disease for treatment. The recent amendment of South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) provides favorable conditions for precision medicine by allowing the sharing and processing of personal data without the explicit consent of data subjects for certain purposes. However, further discussions are needed for PIPA to better reflect an intricate balance between ensuring patient confidentiality and promoting health improvement in precision medicine context.

When designing regulations for precision medicine, considerable attention must be paid to the risks of re-identification from pseudonymized or anonymized data and its impact on the family of a re-identified person to balance confidentiality and health outcome. The issue report suggests that there can be two approaches in designing laws and regulations—preventing ex-ante risk or minimizing ex-post harm in re-identification from pseudonymized or anonymized data.