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Law / Colombia

Codigo Penal, Violacion de Datos Personales

Ley 599 de 2000, art. 269F (added by Ley 1273 de 2009)

A citation is an address, not a summary. The first part names the law; what follows narrows it to the exact section, article or paragraph.

In force since 5 January 2009.

A personal data rule binding public and private bodies.

As of 5 September 2026.

What it requires

  • Do not obtain, compile, extract, or use personal data contained in a file, archive, or database without the controller's authorization, even for data found on a public web page.
  • A datum being accessible on the internet does not exempt collecting it from Colombia's personal-data authorization requirements.

If you get it wrong

Criminal exposureYes

Private right of actionNo

Criminal exposure note

Imprisonment of 48 to 96 months and a fine of 100 to 1,000 monthly legal minimum wages (art. 269F).

Who enforces it

Enforcement body

Fiscalia General de la Nacion

What it reaches

Obligation class

Access restriction, Biometric

What this law does

Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.

Article 269F punishes whoever, without authorization and for their own or a third party's benefit, obtains, compiles, extracts, offers, sells, exchanges, sends, buys, intercepts, discloses, modifies, or uses personal codes or personal data contained in files, archives, databases, or similar media, with imprisonment of 48 to 96 months and a fine of 100 to 1,000 monthly legal minimum wages.

Scraping personal data without the controller's authorization can independently expose the scraper to this criminal offense, on top of the administrative duties Ley 1581 de 2012 imposes on the processing itself; the Superintendencia de Industria y Comercio's Circular Externa 002 de 2024 states that personal data being accessible on the internet does not make it data of a public nature, so Colombia's personal-data regime does not carve out publicly accessible personal data from its own reach.

When LexLint raises it

  • crawls_web
  • trains_models

Read the law

Ley 1273 de 2009
official text inserting Titulo VII BIS into the Codigo Penal, Gestor Normativo, Departamento Administrativo de la Funcion Publica

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