Società per Azioni Esercizi Aeroportuali S.E.A. – Violation Found (Italy, 2025)

The controller is Società per Azioni Esercizi Aeroportuali (S.E.A.), the group of companies that manage 2 airports in Milan. The controller installed and started using a facial recognition system, called "FaceBoarding", for the purpose of passenger identification at the access gates to the sterile area and boarding gates at Milan Linate Airport In July 2025, the DPA initiated investigations regarding this system. First, the DPA found that the biometric template of the data subjects remained stored exclusively in the centralized system of the controller, preventing active control on the part of the data subject over his or her own biometric data. This did not comply with the [https://www.edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/our-documents/opinion-board-art-64/opinion-112024-use-facial-recognition-streamline_de EDPB’s Opinion No. 11/2024 on the use of facial recognition for the streamlining of passenger flows] and therefore violated Article 5(1)(f) GDPR, Article 25 GDPR and Article 32 GDPR. Second, it found that the privacy notice issued by the controller contained inaccurate information where it reports that, with respect to the methods of joining the system via the dedicated App, "the biometric template remains stored exclusively in the smartphone" of the passenger. Third, the ruled that the controller did not take measures to encrypt the biometric template when storing it in its systems, resulting in a violation of Article 32 GDPR. It also foresees extended retention periods for biometric templates of up to 12 months, in in violation of Article 5(1)(e) GDPR and Article 32 GDPR. Fourth, the gates dedicated to FaceBoarding "are hybrid in nature," i.e., they can also be used by passengers who have not joined the aforementioned system. In this circumstance, a biometric template of the data subject is nevertheless generated, although the data subject has not given consent to its processing, in violation of violation of Article 6 GDPR. Consequently, the DPA decided to order the measure of provisional limitation of the processing of biometric data of passengers put in place, through the FaceBoarding system, for the purpose of identifying them at the access gates to the sterile area and at the boarding gates at Milan Linate airport, pursuant to Article 58(2)(f) GDPR.