More than 80 percent of information on people's financial transactions have been transferred from financial institutions to the authorities without their consent, a lawmaker said Sunday.
Rep. Park Min-shik of the governing Grand National Party (GNP) said some 300,000 financial transaction records were sent to government offices last year without prior approval from the people involved in the transactions.
Park said the figure represents an increase of 62.2 percent from a year ago.
Under the current law, financial institutions must get prior consent from those who made the financial transactions unless the information is to be used for tracing accounts and investigations of insider trading.
``Financial institutions offering personal financial transaction records without restrictions will create a problem in terms of information privacy," Park said.
He said he plans to work with other lawmakers to revise the current law in a manner to better protect individual privacy.