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Contract and Commercial Law Act 2017

Electronic transactions - Application of legal requirements to electronic transactions - Preliminary provisions

221: When integrity of information maintained

You could also call this:

“Keeping information the same: what it means and when it's okay to make small changes”

You need to know about something called the integrity of information. This means that the information has stayed the same and hasn’t been changed. It’s like when you write a note and no one changes what you wrote.

The law says that information keeps its integrity when it stays complete and hasn’t been altered. This means no one has added, removed, or changed any part of it. However, there are two small exceptions:

  1. Someone can add an endorsement. This is like when a teacher puts a stamp or a note on your work.

  2. There can be small changes that happen naturally when you send, store, or look at the information. These changes don’t really matter and don’t change what the information means.

So, as long as the main part of the information stays the same, with only these small allowed changes, the law considers that the information has kept its integrity.

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View the original legislation for this page at https://legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1986/0120/latest/link.aspx?id=DLM6844467.

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Part 4 Electronic transactions
Application of legal requirements to electronic transactions: Preliminary provisions

221When integrity of information maintained

  1. For the purposes of this subpart, the integrity of information is maintained only if the information has remained complete and unaltered, except for the addition of any endorsement, or any immaterial change, that arises in the normal course of communication, storage, or display.

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