Law / Samoa

Samoa

13 of 16 named instruments researched to a stage, across six of the ten areas of law we track: 13 in force. As of .

When each starts11 of 13 carry a date, 2 do not. Earlier is before 2014.
Before 2014: 7 instruments (7 in force) earlier 2014: 0 instruments 2015: 0 instruments ’15 2016: 0 instruments 2017: 0 instruments 2018: 0 instruments 2019: 0 instruments 2020: 0 instruments ’20 2021: 0 instruments 2022: 0 instruments 2023: 0 instruments 2024: 4 instruments (4 in force) 2025: 0 instruments 2026: 0 instruments ’26 today

in forcenot yet in forceblocked by a courtproposedno longer in force

  1. AI law 1
  2. Privacy law 5
  3. Scraping law 3
  4. Cybersecurity law 2
  5. Communications law not researched
  6. Content moderation law not researched
  7. Product and AI liability law not researched
  8. Digital accessibility law not researched
  9. Age gating law 1
  10. Reuse law 1

AI law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (129 words)

Samoa has no AI-transparency, AI-risk-obligations, AI-training-data, AI-governance, or AI-sector-rules statute, and no national AI strategy has been published.

The Crimes Act 2013 criminalises publishing, distributing, or exhibiting indecent material on a child, and its definition of child pornography reaches not only a real child but also a person appearing to be a child and an image representing a child engaged in sexually explicit conduct, so the offence binds an AI-generated or otherwise synthetic depiction as well as a photographic one.

Samoa's Information Security Policy 2024, its ICT Sector Plan 2022-2027, and its National Cybersecurity Strategy 2025/26-2030/31 each name emerging digital or cybersecurity risk and set reform priorities for future data-protection and cybercrime legislation, but none is binding legislation and none creates an AI-specific transparency, risk, training-data, or sector duty.

AI prohibited practices

Crimes Act 2013, child pornography offence reaching synthetic and represented depictions

Crimes Act 2013, No. 10 (Samoa), s. 82Text of the Crimes Act 2013, Samoa Consolidated Legislation 2020, PacLII, archived copy

archived copyRead from a public archive copy, not the publisher directly. The publisher does not serve this page to automated readers, so a direct fetch was not an option here; how we access sources. Archived . Publisher's page: https://www.paclii.org/ws/legis/consol_act_2020/ca201382.pdf

In force since . Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Section 82(1) makes it an offence, punishable by imprisonment of up to 7 years, for a person without lawful justification to sell, distribute, exhibit, print, possess, communicate, produce, offer, or knowingly access indecent material on a child, including through an electronic system.

Section 82(2) defines child pornography as pornographic material that depicts, presents, or represents a child engaged in sexually explicit conduct, a person appearing to be a child engaged in sexually explicit conduct, or images representing a child engaged in sexually explicit conduct, and includes any audio, visual, or text pornographic material, so the offence reaches a computer-generated, simulated, or otherwise synthetic depiction of a child in sexually explicit conduct as well as a photograph of a real child. The section defines a child as a person 16 years and under.

What it requires

Privacy law5 instruments, 5 in force

Research summary (148 words)

Samoa has no comprehensive personal-data statute; a legacy record citing a 'Privacy Act 2013' does not correspond to any Act in Samoa's own consolidated legislation index, which lists no Privacy Act. Two sector-specific statutes create real personal-data duties instead.

The National Digital Identification Act 2024 requires the Registrar General and any relying party or data processor in the national digital identification ecosystem to notify a personal data breach within 72 hours and gives a registered person rights of access, correction, deletion, and information about profiling or automated decision-making applied to their data.

The Telecommunications Act 2005 requires a telecommunications service provider to obtain a customer's written consent before disclosing customer information, to keep customer communications confidential, and to identify the purpose for which customer information is collected. Samoa's Crimes Act 2013 was checked and creates no personal-data-specific offence; its computer-system offences are researched under the scraping topic instead.

Breach notification

National Digital Identification Act 2024, personal data breach notification

National Digital Identification Act 2024, No. 3 (Samoa), ss. 47-50 (personal data breach notification)Text of the National Digital Identification Act 2024, Samoa Bureau of Statistics

In force since . Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Section 48 requires a relying party to notify the Registrar General of a personal data breach within 72 hours of becoming aware of it, describing the categories and approximate number of registered persons and personal data records concerned, and to respond without undue delay to the Registrar General's information requests.

Section 49 requires the Registrar General, on learning of a breach likely to result in a high risk to a registered person's rights, to communicate the breach to that person without undue delay in plain language, including advice on mitigating measures, or, where direct communication is not feasible, through public media.

Section 50 requires every such notification to name the notifying entity's contact details, describe the breach's likely consequences and the measures taken or proposed to address it, and requires the Registrar General, relying parties, and data processors to keep a record of all personal data breaches sufficient to demonstrate compliance.

Section 56 separately makes it an offence for a person engaged for the purposes of the Act, a relying party, a data processor, or any other person to disclose, transmit, copy, or otherwise disseminate personal data collected or processed under the Act to an unauthorised person without lawful excuse.

What it requires

Comprehensive regime

Telecommunications Act 2005, confidentiality and protection of customer personal information

Telecommunications Act 2005, No. 20 (Samoa), ss. 48-51, 75A-75B (confidentiality and protection of customer personal information)Text of the Telecommunications Act 2005, Samoa Consolidated Legislation 2020, PacLII, archived copy

archived copyRead from a public archive copy, not the publisher directly. The publisher does not serve this page to automated readers, so a direct fetch was not an option here; how we access sources. Archived . Publisher's page: https://www.paclii.org/ws/legis/consol_act_2020/ta2005214.pdf

In force since . Binds private bodies.

What this law does

Section 48 bars a telecommunications service provider from disclosing information concerning a customer without the customer's written consent, unless disclosure is required or permitted by the Regulator or by law, and gives the customer a right to inspect the provider's records concerning them.

Section 49 requires a service provider to take all reasonable steps to keep customer communications confidential and bars intercepting, monitoring, altering, or modifying their content except for tracing harassing or illegal calls or as otherwise permitted by the Act. Section 50 requires a service provider to operate its network with due regard for customer privacy and to identify the purposes for which customer information is collected at or before collection.

Except as permitted or required by law or with the customer's consent, a service provider must not collect, use, maintain, or disclose customer information for an undisclosed purpose. Sections 75A and 75B separately make it an offence for a service provider's employee, without good and sufficient cause, to divulge information overheard from a telephone conversation or to disclose or use a customer's affairs or personal particulars obtained in the course of duties.

What it requires

Data subject rights

National Digital Identification Act 2024, registered persons' data-subject rights

National Digital Identification Act 2024, No. 3 (Samoa), s. 51 (registered persons' rights)Text of the National Digital Identification Act 2024, Samoa Bureau of Statistics

In force since . Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Section 51(1) gives a registered person the right to obtain from the Registrar General or a relying party, without constraint or unreasonable delay and at no expense, confirmation of whether their personal data is being processed, a copy of it in a paper-based or commonly used electronic format, correction or deletion of inaccurate, out-of-date, incomplete, or misleading data, and detailed information on what data has been accessed, by whom, for what purpose and duration, how long it will be stored, and whether any profiling or automated decision-making process is being applied to it.

Section 51(2) requires the Registrar General and a relying party to implement measures enabling a registered person to exercise these rights effectively. Section 52 clarifies that registration confers no right of citizenship, and section 53 lets a registered person raise a grievance over any improper use of their data.

What it requires

Enforcement supervision

National Digital Identification Act 2024, compliance, information requests and penalties

National Digital Identification Act 2024, No. 3 (Samoa), ss. 54 and 58 (non-compliance, information requests and penalties)Text of the National Digital Identification Act 2024, Samoa Bureau of Statistics

In force since . Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Section 54(1) makes a relying party or data processor that fails to comply with any provision of the Act or its regulations liable on conviction to a fine of up to 500 penalty units for a first failure and up to 1,000 penalty units for any later failure. Section 54(2) lets the Registrar General require relying parties and data processors at any time to provide information about their activities under the Act, to verify their compliance.

Section 54(3) requires the Registrar General, on reason to believe that a relying party or data processor has not complied, to notify the appropriate authority and assist it in any investigation. Section 58(1) makes an offence under section 55, 56 or 57 punishable on conviction by a fine of up to 150 penalty units or imprisonment of up to seven years, or both. Section 58(2) sets the same penalty for any other offence under the Act or its regulations for which no specific penalty is provided.

What it requires

Sensitive categories

National Digital Identification Act 2024, categories of data barred from the Identity Database

National Digital Identification Act 2024, No. 3 (Samoa), s. 27(3) and (4) (data the Identity Database may and may not hold)Text of the National Digital Identification Act 2024, Samoa Bureau of Statistics

In force since . Binds government bodies.

What this law does

Section 27(4) bars the Identity Database from containing any biometric data or data that directly identifies an individual's race, religion, ethnicity, language, income or medical history. Section 27(3) limits the Identity Database to the data it lists, which are the Samoa Digital Identification Number and any associated token, name, date of birth, place of birth, sex, home address, names of parents, date of death, and data about issued, revoked or cancelled ID credentials.

What it requires

Scraping law3 instruments, 3 in force

Research summary (140 words)

Samoa's Crimes Act 2013 criminalises accessing an electronic system without authorisation, so open-web crawling of a public unauthenticated page carries no offence under it absent a technical circumvention of a security measure or an access made for a dishonest purpose.

The Copyright Act 1998 protects a collection of works or of mere data, including a database, as a derivative work only where the collection is original by reason of its selection, coordination, or arrangement, so Samoa's database protection is compilation-only rather than a sui generis database right.

The Electronic Transactions Act 2008 recognises electronic contract formation generally and lets consent to use an electronic record be inferred from a person's conduct, without a provision distinguishing browsewrap from clickwrap acceptance. Personal data collected by a scraper falls within the sector-specific duties researched under the privacy topic; no comprehensive privacy statute exists.

Computer misuse

Crimes Act 2013, computer-access and interference offences

Crimes Act 2013, No. 10 (Samoa), Part 18 (ss. 206-214)Text of the Crimes Act 2013, Samoa Consolidated Legislation 2020, PacLII, archived copy

archived copyRead from a public archive copy, not the publisher directly. The publisher does not serve this page to automated readers, so a direct fetch was not an option here; how we access sources. Archived . Publisher's page: https://www.paclii.org/ws/legis/consol_act_2020/ca201382.pdf

In force since . Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Section 206 makes it an offence, punishable by imprisonment of up to 7 years, to intentionally access, directly or indirectly, an electronic system without authorisation, or being reckless as to whether the person is authorised, and section 207 similarly bars accessing an electronic system dishonestly or by deception to obtain a benefit or cause loss.

Section 208 bars logging into and remaining logged into, or continuing to access, an electronic system without lawful excuse, and section 209 bars intercepting a non-public transmission of electronic data or the electromagnetic emissions of an electronic system without right and with dishonest intent.

Sections 210 to 212 bar damaging, deleting, or altering electronic data, illegally acquiring electronic data that is specially protected against unauthorised access, and interfering with an electronic system so as to endanger life or affect critical infrastructure. Section 213 bars producing, selling, or distributing a device or access code designed or intended for use in committing one of these offences.

Each of sections 206 to 213 is punishable by imprisonment for a term not exceeding 7 years, with no fine stated as an alternative, and section 214 separately punishes making, selling, distributing, or possessing software for committing a crime by the same 7-year term.

None of the exceptions in section 206(2) or 207(3), covering a person already authorised to access the system for another purpose, or a law-enforcement agency acting under a warrant, reaches an outside crawler accessing a page it has no security-measure-based authorisation to access.

What it requires

Contract terms of service (ToS)

Electronic Transactions Act 2008, electronic contract and signature recognition

Electronic Transactions Act 2008, No. 15 (Samoa), ss. 4, 8 (consent to electronic records and electronic signatures)Text of the Electronic Transactions Act 2008, Samoa Consolidated Legislation 2020, PacLII, archived copy

archived copyRead from a public archive copy, not the publisher directly. The publisher does not serve this page to automated readers, so a direct fetch was not an option here; how we access sources. Archived . Publisher's page: https://www.paclii.org/ws/legis/consol_act_2020/eta2008256.pdf

In force since . Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Section 4(1) provides that nothing in the Act requires a person to use, provide, or accept an electronic record without that person's consent, and section 4(2)(b) provides that consent may be inferred from a person's conduct, so a browsewrap-style acceptance by continued use of a service may satisfy a consent requirement without a signed or clicked agreement.

Section 8 lets an electronic signature satisfy a legal requirement for a signature where it adequately identifies the signatory, indicates approval, is as reliable as appropriate to the purpose, and the recipient consents to receiving it, with reliability presumed where the means of creating the signature is linked to and under the control of the signatory alone and no alteration is detectable after signing.

Section 5 makes the Act binding on the Government, subject to an exception for the Controller and Auditor General. The Act creates no offence and states no penalty for its own breach.

What it requires

Cybersecurity law2 instruments, 2 in force

Research summary (422 words)

Samoa has no general private-sector duty to maintain reasonable security over the information it holds, and no enacted statute sets security requirements a software product or connected device must meet before or after it reaches the market.

The Central Bank of Samoa, exercising its power under section 3(2) of the Financial Institutions Act 1996 to issue prudential statements and guidelines, has issued a Financial Institution Prudential Standard, Cybersecurity, as part of its Commercial Banks Prudential Statements 2021, requiring a licensed financial institution to maintain a board-approved cybersecurity risk management framework headed by a Chief Information Security Officer or an equivalent senior officer, covering governance, access control, systems acquisition, logging and monitoring, business continuity, and independent security audit and testing, to notify the Central Bank within sixty minutes of becoming aware of an information security incident that materially affects or could materially affect the institution or its depositors, and to report all cybersecurity incidents to the Central Bank quarterly.

The standard itself states that non-compliance is subject to corrective action by the Central Bank and to the administrative penalties the Financial Institutions Act 1996 provides. Its Prudential Statement 11 on cybersecurity, binding entities licensed under the Financial Institutions Act 1996, is filed as rows of its own.

The Central Bank's 2018 general insurance and 2020 life insurance supervision prudential standards, issued under the same statutory power, carry no equivalent cybersecurity requirement.

Samoa's Crimes Act 2013 criminalises unauthorised access to an electronic system and interference with a system that endangers life or affects critical infrastructure, but each offence binds the person doing the accessing rather than imposing a security duty on the system's owner or operator, so it is researched under the scraping topic instead.

Samoa's National Digital Identification Act 2024 personal data breach notification duty and its Telecommunications Act 2005 customer confidentiality and safeguards duty are already this jurisdiction's privacy topic rows. Samoa's Information Security Policy 2024, ICT Sector Plan 2022-2027, and National Cybersecurity Strategy 2025/26-2030/31 name cybersecurity as a reform priority and anticipate future legislation, but none is binding law and none yet imposes a security duty of its own.

Prudential Statement 11 of the Commercial Banks Prudential Statements requires an entity licensed under the Financial Institutions Act 1996 to have a framework for cybersecurity risk management. Paragraph 106 of Prudential Statement 11 requires an entity licensed under the Financial Institutions Act 1996 to notify the Central Bank not later than sixty minutes after becoming aware of an information security incident that materially affects or could materially affect it or its depositors.

Sector security regimes

Commercial Banks Prudential Statements, Prudential Statement 11 on cybersecurity risk management

Commercial Banks Prudential Statements, January 2021, Prudential Statement 11 (Cybersecurity), paras. 1-3, 99-103 and 107Text of the Commercial Banks Prudential Statements, January 2021, issued by the Central Bank of Samoa

In force. Binds private bodies.

What this law does

Prudential Statement 11 applies to all entities licensed under the Financial Institutions Act 1996. Paragraph 1 of Prudential Statement 11 requires a licensed financial institution to have a framework for cybersecurity risk management, which should be an integral part of its enterprise risk management framework. Paragraph 2 of Prudential Statement 11 requires the framework to be documented and approved by the Board and reviewed regularly.

Paragraph 3 of Prudential Statement 11 requires a licensed financial institution to have a designated cybersecurity risk management function. Paragraph 3(e) of Prudential Statement 11 requires the function to be headed by a person designated as the Chief Information Security Officer or an equivalent senior officer. Paragraph 5 of Prudential Statement 11 requires a licensed financial institution to develop and document an enterprise wide cybersecurity risk strategy approved by the Board.

Paragraph 8 of Prudential Statement 11 requires a licensed financial institution to have in place a cybersecurity policy framework commensurate with its exposures to vulnerabilities and threats. Paragraph 103(a) of Prudential Statement 11 requires a licensed financial institution to conduct security audits and tests, including vulnerability scans and penetration tests, at regular intervals for high risk systems and processes and before such systems are put in production.

Paragraph 99 of Prudential Statement 11 requires a licensed financial institution to have a cybersecurity incident management process governed by documented policy and procedures. Paragraph 107 of Prudential Statement 11 provides that non-compliance with it is subject to corrective actions as provided by the Central Bank and the administrative penalties outlined in the Financial Institutions Act 1996.

Prudential Statement 1 of the Commercial Banks Prudential Statements states that it is made under section 3(2) of the Financial Institutions Act 1996. Section 3(2) of the Financial Institutions Act 1996 allows the Central Bank to issue in writing prudential statements and guidelines in connection with the implementation of provisions of the Act.

Section 3(3) of the Financial Institutions Act 1996 provides that non-compliance with the prudential statements and guidelines may lead the Central Bank to conclude that an institution is following unsound or unsafe practices. Section 13 of the Financial Institutions Act 1996 allows the Central Bank to issue a directive to a licensed financial institution it finds to be following unsound or unsafe practices.

What it requires

Vulnerability and incident reporting

Commercial Banks Prudential Statements, Prudential Statement 11 on cybersecurity incident reporting

Commercial Banks Prudential Statements, January 2021, Prudential Statement 11 (Cybersecurity), paras. 105-106Text of the Commercial Banks Prudential Statements, January 2021, issued by the Central Bank of Samoa

In force. Binds private bodies.

What this law does

Paragraph 105 of Prudential Statement 11 requires a licensed financial institution to provide quarterly reporting on all cybersecurity incidents in the format prescribed in Appendix 1.

Paragraph 106 of Prudential Statement 11 requires a licensed financial institution to notify the Central Bank as soon as possible but not later than sixty minutes after becoming aware of an information security incident that materially affects or has the potential to materially affect the institution or the interests of depositors.

Paragraph 107 of Prudential Statement 11 provides that non-compliance with it is subject to corrective actions as provided by the Central Bank and the administrative penalties outlined in the Financial Institutions Act 1996. Section 3(3) of the Financial Institutions Act 1996 provides that non-compliance with the prudential statements and guidelines may lead the Central Bank to conclude that an institution is following unsound or unsafe practices.

What it requires

Age gating law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (125 words)

Samoa has no social-media minor-access restriction, app-store age-verification requirement, or age-appropriate design code.

Adult content is instead regulated through the Film Control Act 1978, a licensing and classification regime under which the Film Control Board licenses exhibitors, including internet or other computer-based suppliers, and lenders of films, and the Principal Censor classifies a film for general exhibition or restricts it to persons of or over a specified age, with it an offence to exhibit a film contrary to its classification.

The Crimes Act 2013 separately criminalises publishing, distributing, or exhibiting indecent material on a child and possessing or accessing child pornography, but that provision is a general child-protection offence rather than a duty to verify a user's age or gate access to an online service.

Adult content age verification (AV)

Film Control Act 1978, exhibitor and lender licensing and film classification

Film Control Act 1978, No. 26 (Samoa)Text of the Film Control Act 1978, Samoa Consolidated Legislation 2020, PacLII, archived copy

archived copyRead from a public archive copy, not the publisher directly. The publisher does not serve this page to automated readers, so a direct fetch was not an option here; how we access sources. Archived . Publisher's page: https://www.paclii.org/ws/legis/consol_act_2020/fca1978147.pdf

In force since . Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Section 10 requires a person to hold a licence from the Film Control Board before exhibiting or lending a film, and section 10(3) lets the Board determine licence classes for exhibitors including broadcast, cable or satellite television service providers, picture theatres, educational institutions, and internet or other computer-based suppliers.

Section 19 requires the Principal Censor, on approving a film for public exhibition, to classify it either for general exhibition or for exhibition restricted to a specified class of persons only, being persons of or over the age of 5 years, or for specified purposes or occasions only, and section 19(2) bars exhibiting a film contrary to that classification.

Section 3A makes the Act binding on the Government, and section 21 requires the owner, manager, or occupier of exhibition premises to display the Principal Censor's certificate notifying the public of the film's classification.

What it requires

Reuse law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (123 words)

Samoa has no press-publisher neighbouring right and no platform-to-publisher bargaining code; the Copyright Act 1998 is the only law reaching an aggregator's reproduction of Samoan news content.

Section 9 permits quoting a short part of a published work without authorisation, subject to a fair-practice and extent-justified test and a source and author attribution requirement, and section 12(a) separately permits reproducing, broadcasting, or otherwise communicating to the public a newspaper or periodical article on a current economic, political, or religious topic, unless the right to authorise reproduction is expressly reserved, with section 12(b) permitting reproduction of short excerpts of a work in the course of reporting current events.

No statute or reported Samoan decision addresses hyperlinking, framing, hot-news misappropriation, or a machine-readable text-and-data-mining opt-out.

Case law

  • No current case law for Samoa AI law
  • No current case law for Samoa privacy law
  • No current case law for Samoa scraping law
  • No current case law for Samoa cybersecurity law
  • No current case law for Samoa communications law
  • No current case law for Samoa content moderation law
  • No current case law for Samoa product and AI liability law
  • No current case law for Samoa digital accessibility law
  • No current case law for Samoa age gating law
  • No current case law for Samoa reuse law

Reporting clocks that run here2 instruments

The instruments whose obligation lines set a deadline for reporting an incident, a vulnerability or a personal-data breach, each deadline read from the sentence that carries it and listed shortest first. The law of Samoa comes first, then the law of the bodies above it that applies here.

Each flag is one law, and a link to it. Read down the scale: the clocks document's time axis, with the empty stretches shortened so the deadlines sit close. Flags on one line set the same duty at the same deadline, and the laws behind them are named to the right, with what each clock counts from.

60 minutes
72 hours
Breach notificationprivacy law
The deadlines above on one time axis, shortest at the top. The axis keeps its order and, between neighbors, its proportion, but a stretch with no deadline on it is shortened, so the hour marks on the left are what say how far apart two stations really are. Beside each action, the laws that set it, what each counts from, and a status where the law is not yet in force. The List tab has the same data in full, with the sentences.

The law of Samoa

60 minutes

Commercial Banks Prudential Statements, Prudential Statement 11 on cybersecurity incident reporting

Commercial Banks Prudential Statements, January 2021, Prudential Statement 11 (Cybersecurity), paras. 105-106security law, in force

The sentence the clocks are read from

Notify the Central Bank of Samoa as soon as possible and not later than sixty minutes after becoming aware of an information security incident that materially affects, or has the potential to materially affect, the institution or the interests of depositors, financially or non-financially (paragraph 106).

72 hours

National Digital Identification Act 2024, personal data breach notification

National Digital Identification Act 2024, No. 3 (Samoa), ss. 47-50 (personal data breach notification)privacy law, in force since

The sentences the clocks are read from

As a relying party or data processor in the National Digital Identification System, notify the Registrar General (a data processor may notify the relying party instead) of a personal data breach within 72 hours of becoming aware of it, describing the categories and approximate number of registered persons and records concerned; the 72 hours may be extended for the needs of law enforcement or as reasonably necessary to determine the scope of the breach.

As the Registrar General, where a personal data breach has occurred in the National Digital Identification System or you are informed of one by a data processor or relying party, and it is likely to result in a high risk to a registered person's rights, communicate the breach to that person without undue delay, in plain and clear language, with advice on measures to mitigate its adverse effects.

Which of these one incident starts turns on the facts: the incident method works that through. The clocks document draws every clock in the LexLint law library on one axis, with the sentence beside every rung.

Drafted with AI

Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page. How this site is made

This page covers the instruments LexLint has researched to a stage. Instruments named in the law library but not yet researched are counted in the head and are not listed here. Every entry carries its own primary source on its note page. This is a research index, not legal advice.