Plain language law

New Zealand law explained for everyone

 Plain Language Law homepage
Back to
164: Interpretation
or “This section defines key terms used in the Privacy Act 2020”
You could also call this:

“Government agencies can access personal identity information held by other agencies for specific reasons”

You can look at information about who someone is if you work for certain organisations. These organisations are called ‘accessing agencies’. If you work for an accessing agency, you can look at identity information that is kept by another organisation. This other organisation is called a ‘holder agency’.

You can only look at this information for a specific reason. The reason you’re allowed to look at the information is written in Schedule 3. This schedule lists the accessing agencies, the reasons they can look at the information, and which holder agencies have the information they can access.

This text is automatically generated. It might be out of date or be missing some parts. Find out more about how we do this.

Next up: 166: Manner and form of access

or “How you can access personal information and in what format”
Next

Part 7 Sharing, accessing, and matching personal information
Identity information

165Access by agencies to identity information

  1. An accessing agency may, for the purpose specified in the second column of Schedule 3 opposite the name of the accessing agency, have access to an individual’s identity information held by a holder agency specified in the third column of that schedule opposite the name of the accessing agency.

Compare