12. Do employees have the right to obtain a copy of their personal records including appraisal reports?

Data protection principle 6 stipulates that an individual has the right to ascertain whether a data user holds personal data about him/her and to request access to such data. However, as per the previous answer for question 9, the Ordinance stipulates that employment-related data for the purpose of staff planning or evaluative processes are exempt from the data access request principle. In other words, the employees may not be entitled to obtain their appraisal reports from their boss. As mentioned in question 9, however, this exemption is discretionary but not mandatory. An employer can still choose to comply with data access requests and release those personal records to employees.