Personal Information Protection Commission

Press Release

The PIPC Finalizes Prior Adequacy Review Results of Naver’s Agentic AI Search Service 

- The PIPC presents privacy protection criteria for personalized agentic AI services

May 31, 2026

(This is an unofficial translation of a press release, originally prepared in Korean.)

The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) held its 10th plenary meeting of 2026 and finalized deliberation results on Prior Adequacy Review of AI Tab, an agentic AI search service developed by Naver, on May 31, 2026.

The Prior Adequacy Review Mechanism enables businesses to collaborate with the PIPC to develop new services and establish compliance plans that align with the ever-increasing complexities of the privacy landscape. This mechanism helps bridge gaps where existing legal interpretations and precedents are insufficient for new technologies and services. Once devised plans are properly implemented, businesses are exempted from future administrative sanctions.

Before the official launch of AI Tab, an AI-powered personalized search chatbot service, Naver applied to have this service reviewed by the PIPC’s Prior Adequacy Review Mechanism to ensure compliance with the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), enabling that user data would be leveraged in a lawful and safe manner.

Unlike conventional search services that display web pages based on the user-entered queries, AI Tab provides one-on-one conversational interactions and generates summarized and analyzed responses. In terms of AI-generated outputs, this service will reach its full potential by using a user’s service usage history, gender, age group, interests, and preferences to provide personalized service results. It will help the service generate tailored and context-aware search results by incorporating information about the user beyond the query entered. 

To this end, Naver wanted to use such user data generated through its platform services, including publicly available data such as likes, shares, purchase history, and other behavioral data. However, content that is not accessible to the general public, including private or partially disclosed content, would be excluded from such use.

After deliberations, the PIPC finalized its review on Naver’s AI Tab, proposing three requirements to be met. The following explains the three requirements in detail. 

First, for users who do not want to receive personalized search results, the company was advised to inform users of opt-out features in an easy-to-understand and readable manner. The PIPC calls on Naver to complement its plans to ensure effective exercise of users’ rights to opt out of having their personal data used to train AI models through incorporating user feedback. 

Second, the PIPC recommends that Naver unveil the categories and main content of personal information used to generate personalized responses for ‘AI Tab’ service through the company’s privacy policy. The PIPC also calls on Naver to come up with additional safeguards to prevent the misuse, abuse and disclosure of personal information.

Last but not least, the PIPC advises Naver to prevent the inference, or use of sensitive information when analyzing users’ activity history across the company's services. The PIPC also emphasizes that the service must not generate outputs containing uniquely identifiable information (UII), account numbers, credit card numbers, other identifiers. Under the PIPA, sensitive information includes personal information relating to an individual’s ideology, belief, admission to or withdrawal from a trade union or political party, political opinions, health, sex life, and other personal information that may threaten the privacy of data subjects. 

Meanwhile, the PIPC will monitor whether Naver implements the PIPC's recommendations once the service is officially rolled out. 

Since October 2023, the PIPC has conducted Prior Adequacy Reviews for 20 cases, including those involving two foreign business operators. Recently, the proliferation of AI technologies has made data processing mechanisms more complex. Accordingly, businesses find it difficult to identify legal bases for data processing and to address uncertainties in the appropriateness of the safeguards or guardrails that they put in place before launching AI enabled services. 

Going forward, the PIPC will actively support AI transformation (AX) and data use by overhauling comprehensive innovation support schemes, including the Prior Adequacy Review Mechanism and special provisions regarding AI, following the recent passage of relevant amendment bill by the National Policy Committee.

* A PDF file, formatted for better readability, is attached.