Article 1 of the Data Protection Law defines the term ‘personal data’ as ‘any kind of information, which relates to a certain individual, which is recorded on an electronic, paper or other medium’. In terms of accessibility, personal data can be divided into two types: public (such as telephone directory, social media, etc) and restricted. Publicly available personal data includes information, which is either freely accessible upon consent of the individual (owner of personal data) or exempted from confidentiality in accordance with the laws of Turkmenistan. 

The Data Protection Law additionally introduces a term ‘biometric data’ that encompasses any information that reflects physical and biological characteristics of an individual (owner of personal data). The term is somewhat similar to the term ‘biometric data’ that is envisaged in the GDPR (Article 4(14)) but does not include any reference to physiological and behavioural characteristics. 

Both personal data and biometric data are recognized as confidential under the Data Protection Law and collection and processing of such data must be limited to the purposes the data is collected for. 

In Turkmenistan the Data Protection Law does not provide for a definition of sensitive personal data. It is directly prohibited to collect specific categories of personal data which, inter alia, includes data on nationality, skin colour, religious and political views, medical conditions, etc. Collection of such categories of personal data is permissible under the following circumstances:

• Receipt of a written consent of owner of personal information
• Such personal data is publicly available
• Collection of personal data is required for healthcare and health protection of an owner of such personal data
• Collection of personal data is performed by religious or non-commercial organization provided that the collected data would not be distributed without a prior written consent of owner of personal data
• Collection of personal data is required for implementation of justice and / or investigative activity