Once the Personal Information Protection Commission has required documents to be submitted or has collected them in an inspection, may those papers be given to anyone else or made public?
General information · Not legal advice
Material to check
For this exercise, we look at the papers recording which materials the Commission required the personal information handler to submit and which records it collected on entering the office or business premises, and at any correspondence showing a request that those materials be passed to a third party or released to the public, since the provision turns on the papers having been received or collected under its first two paragraphs.
These are types of material to look for, not evidence already verified by PRO SE.
Where readings differ
One reading treats the prohibition as firm and tied to how the papers arrived: documents the Commission has received under the material-submission requirement, or collected in an inspection, must not be provided to a third party or disclosed to the public, and the only stated way out is where the Act itself provides for such a release.
Another reading stresses that the exception is written as 'except where provided for under this Act', so the provision does not itself name the situations in which release is permitted, nor does it say how a person whose information sits in those documents could ask to see them, leaving the scope of the exception to the other provisions of the Act.
Your judgment
If the file contains a request to release collected materials, which provision of the Act could the Commission rely on to say the release is one the Act provides for?
PRO SE does not make this decision or keep a case record on this public site.When to reconsider
We look at this again if the provision is amended to change the exception for third-party provision or public disclosure, or if the Commission's own notice sets out the procedure and method for requiring submission and conducting inspections, which bears on how the papers reached the Commission.