Integration of privately held data on third parties in the production of official statistics is one of the main challenges for modernisation and quality improvements of such statistics. Several initiatives in the international statistical community have been taken to facilitate access and use of such data, also commonly denoted big data. Proper statistical legislation is one of the preconditions for such access. In Norway, a new Statistics Act was adopted in 2019. The act emphasises quality requirements to official statistics, the coordination role of Statistics Norway for all such statistics which are described in a multiannual programme, and the access to privately held data for use in official statistics. For data access, use of receipts from grocery stores linked to bank transaction data represents a test of the new statistics act and the GDPR. Such data are very relevant for the household budget survey, a survey which places a heavy response-burden on the participants, leading to quality challenges. The paper summarises some of the Statistics Norway’s experiences with accessing privately held data, exemplified by the work to acquire data to develop a new household budget survey. Key aspects in addition to the legal ones are cost-benefit analyses, collaboration, privacy protection and methodological developments. The Norwegian Data Protection Agency means the data collection authority of Statistics Norway is applied too broadly for collecting such large amounts of personal data and has prohibited the proposed approach. Statistics Norway disagrees, but a dialogue with the Data Protection Agency aiming at outlining different choices of methodology to bring the work forward has started. Experiences on the process so far should anyway be useful beyond the national level.
