Studio Colli Aniene Verderocca S.r.l. – €5,000 Fine (Italy, 2022)

A data subject filed a complaint with the Italian DPA (Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali – Garante) claiming he had received numerous undesired and periodic telephone calls promoting the real estate agency Tecnocasa in relation to a property he owns. The data subject also stated that he had not received a response to access and deletion requests under Article 15 GDPR and Article 17 GDPR respectively, which were forwarded to Studio Colli Aniene Verderocca S.r.l., a marketing company, which was the registered holder of the telephone numbers making the calls. The Garante initiated an investigation, and determined that the marketing company (and not the real estate agency) was the autonomous controller in this case, since it processed the data based on its own data collection, and had established the purposes and methods of contact for the marketing calls independently. When responding to the Garante’s request for information, the marketing company argued that they had only called the data subject twice. On the first occasion they had asked for his consent to the calls, which the company acknowledged that the data subject had objected to. The second call was admittedly made by a “mere error in good faith”, in light of the previously acknowledged objection. The company also claimed that the acquisition of the personal data was lawful since it had been found on the internet on publicly available websites as well as through Google searches, and also stated that it had deleted the complainant’s personal data from its databases. The Garante noted that irrespective of the amount of calls made to the data subject, the fact that the data was obtained from the internet and that the initial call was made without prior consent or any other legal basis, constituted a violation of Articles 6 and 7 GDPR. Additionally, the Garante stated according to its own jurisprudence (see [https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=Garante_per_la_protezione_dei_dati_personali_-_9256486 here]