Data Privacy Act of 2012, Application to Scraped Public Personal Data
Republic Act No. 10173 (2012), Section 12
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.
A personal data rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 7 September 2026.
What it requires
- An app scraping the publicly available personal data of an individual in the Philippines must still identify a lawful basis for processing that data under the Data Privacy Act; the data's public availability does not by itself supply the data subject's consent or any other lawful basis.
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Section 12 permits the processing of personal information only if not otherwise prohibited by law and only when at least one of several listed conditions exists, most commonly the data subject's consent or another enumerated lawful basis; the section draws no exception for personal data that is publicly available online.
The National Privacy Commission's NPC Advisory No. 2026-01 (13 April 2026), Guidelines on Data Scraping of Publicly Available Personal Data, states as guidance that the public availability of personal data does not by itself constitute the data subject's consent to its processing, so a controller scraping publicly available personal data must still identify one of Section 12's lawful bases for the specific purpose of that processing.
When LexLint raises it
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