NEIS

NEIS stands for the National Education Information System (교육행정정보/敎育行政情報 시스템).

NEIS was the biggest recent privacy struggle between the government and the public. But it is true that NEIS, firstly proposed in 2003, has enhanced the efficiency of educational administration and improved teachers’ working conditions.

Key words
NEIS, personal information, privacy issue, e-Government project, Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union

NEIS and e-Government project
The Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development (currently the Ministry of Education: the 'Education Ministry', 교육부/敎育部) asserted that NEIS would be an efficient, technologically advanced and transparent system.

NEIS sought to centralize personal data of about eight million students from 12,000 primary and secondary schools across the country in a national broadband network. Twenty-seven categories of personal information were to be consolidated in NEIS servers maintained by local education agencies. NEIS was supposed to include data on students’ academic records, medical history, counseling notes, and family background. Even data on teachers’ trade union activities were to be held by the Education Ministry.

The Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union (KTU or Jeon Gyo Jo, 전국교직원노동조합 or 전교조/全敎組) opposed the system. It and other civic organizations conducted protest rallies and threatened a general strike. Disappointed by the lukewarm response of the government, they brought an action with the National Human Rights Commission. The enhanced efficiency in information sharing offered by NEIS was depicted as a potential risk to privacy.

The Commission recommended that three of 27 categories of personal data be excluded from the NEIS databases. Accordingly the Education Ministry excluded these three categories of data, keeping other 24 categories of school affairs intact.

NEIS and the Judiciary intervention
While NTU threatened to stage an all-out protest against the implementation of NEIS in November 2003, the Seoul District Court approved a motion to block the use of NEIS data-contained CDs of three high school students. As a result, the Education Ministry was prohibited from distributing useful student data from the NEIS necessary for the application for the college entrance exam. Because NEIS data-contained CDs regarding applicants were indispensable to the processing of the on-line college entrance applications, such a negative court order could paralyze the whole college entrance exam procedure.

In December 2003, the government decided to separate the sensitive data from the NEIS databases and to operate them in different computer systems.

In July 2005, the Constitutional Court held that such personal information as the graduate’s name, birthday and graduation date, contained in the NEIS databases, are necessary for the administrative purposes of the Education Ministry.

Consequently, pertinent schools and institutions are able to issue certificates of graduation at any time by accessing the NEIS database. So the current NEIS databases were found to comply with the Constitution and the relevant laws on data protection, and could be maintained.