Law on Personal Data, open-category personal data and scraped public information

Art. 5.3 creates a category of 'open' personal data: information made public by the data subject, or entered into a resource created for general use, with the subject's consent.

Art. 9.6 lists the lawful bases for collecting and processing personal data, and data of the open category is one of the grounds recognised there alongside the subject's consent to a particular collection, a legislative basis defining the purpose and method of processing, fully anonymised scientific or statistical research, and vital-interest necessity.

Reading Art. 5.3 together with Art. 9.6 supports treating personal data an individual has made public in Azerbaijan, or that sits in a general-use resource with that individual's consent to its being made public, as covered by the open-category ground; no single provision of the Act states this combined conclusion in so many words.

Art. 5.3's open-category definition requires the data to have been made public by the subject or entered into a general-use resource with the subject's own consent; it does not itself say what regime applies to data made public by someone other than the subject, or without the subject's consent, such as a leak or a third party's repost, and no other provision of the Act fills that gap, so such data most plausibly remains subject to the Act's ordinary lawful-basis requirement rather than the narrower open-category ground.