Koreans increasingly anxious about personal data breach

A Coupang logistics center in Seoul / Yonhap

By Lee Kyung-min

• Published Dec 4, 2025 7:00 AM KST

Seo Ji-yeon, 42, a working mother, said she thought she had made peace with receiving spam calls, but the recent Coupang data breach pushed her anxiety to a new level.

“My delivery and purchase history include my child’s school and cram school addresses,” she said. “I mean, it’s bad enough that my phone number is out there, but my kid’s information? That’s another story. Companies always apologize, but nothing really changes.”

Receiving spam calls about new credit card issuance is something she is all too familiar with now — something she can easily brush off.

However, she said she cannot afford to do that when it comes to her daughter.

“I heard that the mother of my daughter’s friend at school received a voice phishing message and a phone call. It was apparently from someone pretending to be the daughter, asking her to send money to a certain account, saying she had lost her phone. When I heard that, it sent chills down my spine, because I don’t know what I would have done if it had happened to me.”

Similarly, Kim Hee-sun, 29, an office worker, said she changes her passwords every couple of months to keep her accounts safe.

“It takes time and energy. It’s always irritating that I have to do that. But I’m more worried about having my accounts hacked,” she said.

Kim said she stores her work on cloud servers, always feeling unsafe. “I use those services to make life easier, but every time news breaks about a personal data breach, I feel exhausted worrying about whether the stored data might be compromised. I keep changing passwords and hope for the best.”

The two women are among many Korean who are increasingly becoming anxious about whether their personal information remain safe, as indicated by the level of concern climbing to the highest since the government began compiling data in 2020.

According to Ministry of Data and Statistics, formerly Statistics Korea, 57.6 percent of respondents last year said they felt “unsafe” about personal data protection, up 4.4 percentage points from a year earlier.

People in their 30s showed the highest level of anxiety, with 65.1 percent saying data breaches made them feel unsafe, followed by those in their 50s (58.6 percent) and 40s (58.4 percent).

This has been exacerbated by a slew of recent hacking incidents and large-scale data breaches.

This year alone, massive consumer data breaches were reported by Coupang, following ones at SK Telecom and Lotte Card.

The latest Coupang breach involved the data of more than 33 million customers, including names, phone numbers, home addresses, recent purchase history and even passwords for apartment building entrances.

The Personal Information Protection Commission ordered Coupang to revise their customer notifications to “breach,” instead of “exposure.”

The commission also said Coupang failed to properly notify individuals whose delivery addresses were breached alongside user accounts.