Case Law | Refusal to annul a sanction filed by the National Directorate for the Protection of Personal Data – Unlawful processing of personal data through commercial reports.
Data Privacy & Data Protection Department | Case Law | Refusal to annul a sanction filed by the National Directorate for the Protection of Personal Data – Unlawful processing of personal data through commercial reports
“Open Discovery S.A. v. EN M° Justicia”, Federal Contentious-Administrative Court No. 8, 15 of October 2020.
The company Open Discovery S.A., which provides commercial and location reports of individuals, filed a lawsuit against the National State in order to obtain a declaration of nullity of the Decision of 22 April 2009 issued by the National Directorate for the Protection of Personal Data (“NDPPD”), alleging that it was invalid on the grounds that the essential elements of the administrative act were flawed.
In the aforementioned Decision, the NDPPD imposed a fine of AR$ 50,001 and ordered the closure of all databases used to prepare the “Globinfo” report, considering that (i) this type of report incorporates a large amount of personal information that is in breach of the provisions of the Personal Data Protection Law No. 25,326; (ii) the processing carried out to transfer data in reports whose content exceeds that authorized by the aforementioned Law No. 25,326 is unlawful; (iii) the reports carried out by Open Discovery do not comply with the principle of quality of the data established in Article 4 of the aforementioned Law No. 25,326, since it does not distinguish between the interests of the transferees and provides the entire collected information, so that whoever acquires a “Globinfo” report for the purpose of locating the whereabouts of persons obtains, in addition to this information, the financial position of the person involved, so that the requirement of legitimate interest for the transfer of data, pursuant to Article 11 of Law No. 25,326, would not be met either.
More than ten years later, the Contentious-Administrative Court confirmed the arguments outlined in the Decision of the NDPPD, refusing the claim filed by the plaintiff in the understanding that the administrative act does not contain defects in its essential elements. Notwithstanding the above, it should be noted that the first instance judgment is not final, as on 22 October 2020 the plaintiff filed an appeal and its resolution is pending.
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