Purr-sonal Information: Do Cats Have Privacy Rights?
In New Zealand, cats are everywhere, from beloved companions curled up on sofas to stealthy hunters roaming the bush at night. But as our relationship with animals evolves, an interesting question arises: do cats have privacy rights? And if not, should they?
When we talk about “privacy rights,” we usually mean rights protecting people from misuse of information about them. In New Zealand, those protections are embodied in the Privacy Act 2020, which governs how “personal information” must be collected, used, disclosed, stored, corrected, and accessed organisations that hold it.
The Privacy Act protects individuals, i.e. identifiable persons (humans), not non-human animals. The Act defines “personal information” as information about an identifiable individual, meaning a natural person, and thereby limits its protections to human subjects.
Therefore, this means that information held about a cat, for example its whereabouts, health records, behavioural monitoring, microchip data, sensor logs or video footage, does not on its own trigger rights under the Privacy Act.
Still, the situation is more interesting when the information about a cat is tied to a human. Many kinds of animal-related information inevitably implicate human personal information. For example:
A veterinary clinic’s records of a cat will typically include the owner’s name, address, contact details, billing information, and perhaps notes about their circumstances. This is all personal information in relation to human and thus fall under the Privacy Act.
Location or tracking data from a cat’s GPS collar might also reveal patterns about the human owner (e.g. where they live, where they walk). If that data is stored or used in a way that identifies or can be linked to the person, it may well be covered.
Registries for companion animals might require owner details or tie the animal to a human.
Thus, while the cat itself is not covered by the Privacy Act, the humans connected to or responsible for the cat often are, so any system collecting information about cats must still consider the Privacy Act.
Could one imagine expanding privacy law to cover animals (or information about them)? It’s theoretically possible but would require legislative change. It would pose many tricky questions: would the cat be able to make a Privacy Act request to access or correction their information? Who represents the cat? What limits would exist (e.g. in the name of public interest, animal control, research)? The law as it stands is not built to address those questions.
So yes, the Privacy Act does not currently grant rights to cats over information held about them. But in many real-world systems, the human-animal nexus means privacy obligations can’t be ignored.