Case Law | Habeas Data – Ordinary Jurisdiction – Information not contained in a database accessible via the Internet.
Data Privacy & Data Protection Department | Case Law | Habeas Data – Ordinary Jurisdiction – Information not contained in a database accessible via the Internet
“D. F., D. A. v. Paktar SRL”, Federal Court of Appeals in Civil and Commercial Matters, Division III, 30 December 2020.
The plaintiff brought the habeas data lawsuit regulated in Section 43 of the National Constitution and in Law No. 25,326 on the Protection of Personal Data against Paktar SRL in order to find out what information was held about him in its database and, in particular, whether he was registered as a debtor and, if so, of what obligations; whether the data had been transferred to third parties; what products and services were registered or contracted in his name; and in the event that errors or inaccuracies were found, he claimed the relevant rectification and/or deletion.
The Court of First Instance declared that he did not have jurisdiction to examine the case and attributed such jurisdiction to the Commercial Courts on the grounds that federal jurisdiction is limited and exceptional and that the case did not meet either of the two requirements set out in the law for federal jurisdiction (Section 36, Law No. 25,326). Against this decision, the plaintiff filed a motion for reconsideration with a subsidiary appeal, stating that the hypothesis of Section 36 b) of Law No. 25,326, which provides for federal jurisdiction when the data files are interconnected in national or international inter-jurisdictional networks, was met. In this sense, he stated that it could not be assumed that the defendant’s database was not connected to that of the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic and even to others, such as Veraz.
The Court of First Instance rejected the reconsideration and granted the appeal. The Federal Court of Appeals in Civil and Commercial Matters rejected the appeal, confirming the decision of the Judge of First Instance.
To this end, the Court explained that “the aforementioned paragraph b of Section 36 of Law 25,326 has been interpreted by the Supreme Court in the sense that it applies to cases in which access to or deletion of data contained in Internet databases is sought, which implies that they are interconnected in inter-jurisdictional virtual networks. This interpretation implies that, in order to assess the applicability of the federal jurisdiction, the inter-jurisdictional aspect of the media used -the Internet- must be taken into account as a matter of priority. In this case, no evidence has been provided to support the federal jurisdiction insisted upon by the plaintiff, which is limited and exceptional (arts. 116 and 117 of the National Constitution). Indeed, the documents submitted do not enable to assume that the information concerned is contained in a database accessible via the Internet, and therefore interconnected in inter-jurisdictional virtual networks. Consequently, the habeas data must be submitted to the ordinary commercial courts”.
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