The Korea Herald reported today that the Korean government is going to retire to conference tables, drink coffee, eat a few hot dogs and write a new data protection law.

A new law is apparently necessary to protect consumers from ravenous companies who enjoy collecting data from hapless punters. At the moment, Korean companies collect users' personal data without a second thought. However, the new law seems to have a nasty hitch. It will require ISPs to save the real names of people who post their two cents' worth on the Internet.

People who think they're the victim of malicious slander, nasty rumours or who may simply not agree with posted comments can request ISPs to delete messages. That's a measure which is sure to backfire, cost a lot of money and turn Korean message boards into Newspeak zones, whilst people bicker it out and throw virtual handbags on English sites outside of South Korea. 37 web companies already have to adhere to the South Korean real-name policy, however the Korean Communications Commission wants to make its very bad idea very compulsory.

Apart from drawing up laws which are sensible in one area and insane in other ones, South Korea also plans to double state investments in IT security from 4.3% of the 2008 IT budget to nearly 9% by 2012. The South Korean IT security market shall be made to grow up to 20 trillion won by 2019. The government will expend 700 billion won on public IT security.

According to the newspaper, there have so far been 25,000 hacks and 308,000 leaks of personal data in both the public and private sectors this year. Punters seem to not really care a lot, despite being open books in one of the worlds Internet-savvy countries.

Companies don't care a lot either, as the report said Hanarotelecom secretly sold data on six million customers to 1,000 telemarketing firms in the last two years.

The new law will also address such shenanigans and put tabs on telemarketeers, the most hated of the lot in Europe. X