OECD members: Adopted Declaration on Government Access to Personal Data held by Private Sector Entities

On 14 December 2022, the Member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development adopted the Declaration on Government Access to Personal Data held by Private Sector Entities. The Declaration aims to ensure that the access requests are not unreasonable, arbitrary or disproportionate. The Declaration includes guiding principles the states agreed to follow to protect individuals’ privacy, human rights and freedoms when requesting private entities to make the data available to government agencies. The principles include legal basis, legitimate aims, legal approvals, data handling only by authorised personnel, transparency, oversight and the existence of redress mechanisms. Furthermore, the Declaration states that under the transparency principle, the private sector entities could issue public reports outlining aggregate statistical data of the number of requests they received to provide access to the information they store in conformity with the legal framework.