Seoul: the topics built from likes¶

In November 2024 South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission, the PIPC, fined Meta 21.6 billion won, about 15.6 million dollars, for collecting sensitive information about roughly 980,000 Facebook users and passing it to some 4,000 advertisers without consent.

Sensitive by inference¶

The categories were among the most protected there are: sexual orientation and same-sex relationships, religion, political opinion, and, in a detail particular to the peninsula, whether a person was a defector from North Korea. None was asked directly. Meta assembled them by reading which pages a person liked and which adverts they clicked, turning ordinary engagement into advertising topics that named a faith or marked someone as gay or transgender. The inferred trait is the highest-value thing the market makes, and this is that trait built at national scale and sold by the thousand.

Not the regulator’s first pass¶

Two years earlier, in September 2022, the same commission had fined Google 69.2 billion won and Meta 30.8 billion won for tracking users’ behaviour for advertising without proper consent, the largest privacy penalty in the country at the time. The 2024 case moved the finding one step on, from the tracking itself to the sensitive conclusions the tracking makes cheap.

The pattern¶

This is inferring the protected trait at platform scale, the same move that Grindr and Flo show on smaller stages. The likes were the raw material; the sensitive topic was the product; a checkbox marked sensitive was never needed.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-17.