Privacy Act 2020, Reach Over Scraped Personal Information
Privacy Act 2020 (NZ), No 31, ss. 4, 7, 22 (IPP 1, 2)
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 1 December 2020.
A personal data rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 6 September 2026.
What it requires
- Do not collect personal information, including personal information scraped from a public website, unless it is for a lawful purpose connected with a function or activity of your organisation and the collection is necessary for that purpose.
- Collecting personal information other than directly from the individual, including by scraping, is excused from the source-of-collection principle where the source is a publicly available publication, but the information remains subject to every other duty the Act imposes.
If you get it wrong
Private right of actionNo
Who enforces it
Enforcement body
Office of the Privacy Commissioner
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
The Privacy Act 2020's definition of personal information carries no exception for information that is publicly accessible, so an agency, including an overseas agency carrying on business in New Zealand, that scrapes personal information from a public website, including for AI training, must still collect it only for a lawful purpose connected with a function of the agency and only where necessary for that purpose under information privacy principle 1.
Information privacy principle 2 ordinarily requires collection directly from the individual concerned, but excuses that where the information is a publicly available publication, so a scrape drawing on such a publication does not by itself breach the source-of-collection principle even though the information remains personal information for every other purpose of the Act.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_modelsprocesses_biometrics
Read the law
official consolidated Act text, New Zealand Legislation