ILITA – the Israeli Law Information and Technology Authority issued on Tuesday – July 19, a draft guidance on the application of the right of access under the Protection of Privacy Act (PPA) to voice calls, video recordings, online text messages and other digital information.

The proposed guidelines make clear that Section 13 of the PPA which establishes the right of data subjects to access data related to them in data bases, applies to access to digital information of all kinds.

ILITA further proposes that the application of the right of access should be in-line with the way the information is stored. This means that data base owners should send copies of the recordings or digital information securely and in standard formats to the data subjects upon their request, and after the data subjects properly identified themselves. This method of data access should replace data subjects’ need to arrive physically at the data base owners’ facilities to access their data.

ILITA requests comments from the public to the draft guidelines by August 18, this year.

ILITA is a justice department authority and includes the Databases Registrar – the Israeli privacy commissioner. ILITA’s guidelines reflect their interpretation of the PPA, but they are not obligatory.

The draft guidelines are accessible (in Hebrew) on ILITA’s website.

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