At present, personal data and data privacy are governed and protected in Argentina by Law 25,326 (Personal Data Protection Act). This article summarizes the main provisions of the Act, and at the same time highlights recent legal developments related to the National Registry of Databases.
The objectives of the law are: full protection of personal information recorded in data files, registries, databases or other technical means of data treatment, either public or private, for the purpose of providing reports guarding the honour and privacy of individuals, as well as access to information that may be recorded about such persons, in accordance with the provisions of Article 43, third paragraph of the Argentine Constitution.
The law emphasizes the need for consent to personal data being included in files, as well as the need to assess the legal safety of the country where such data are to be transferred. (For example, prior to any assignment of personal data, article 11 of Law 25,326 requires the prior consent of the data owner.)
The controlling authority is the National Board for Personal Data Protection.
Files, records or databases that include personal data must be registered in compliance with the principles set forth in Law 25,326 in cases of:
- databases that provide credit information or any other report of any nature whatsoever, including personal information;
- databases that exceed the "exclusive personal use" of the owner; and
- databases that have the purpose of assigning or transferring personal information.
All databases meeting these characteristics must be registered in the National Register.
Because the Board employs broad standards in determining which types of databases must be registered, only in very limited cases is it not necessary to comply with the registration procedure.
Since the registration of a database (that must be annually renewed) constitutes a condition for its legality, it was necessary to implement a mechanism whereby third parties could identify which databases have complied with the obligatory annual renewal.
The National Board for Data Privacy Protection enacted on February 14 2008 a provision (1/2008) approving the design of iso-logotypes that database owners can use in their web pages in order to identify that their databases have complied with the obligatory annual renewal.
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