doctor – Court Ruling (Austria, 2020)

The complainant lodged a complaint pursuant to Article 77 of the GDPR on the grounds of infringement of the right to erasure of data pursuant to Article 17 of the GDPR and the right to object to data processing pursuant to Article 21 of the GDPR against one of Austria's leading doctor search platforms. This platform is intended to enable patients and doctors to find each other. For this purpose, it listed doctors on its website - including the complainant- with their title, name, address, speciality, telephone number and surgery hours. Directly below the presentation of this data, the platform allows anonymous third parties to rate the respective doctors according to a school grading system in various categories as well as to write a "field report" in free text. In order to be able to submit such an evaluation, it was necessary to register on the website with a freely selected user name and to provide an e-mail address and date of birth. The entry of further data was not required. The complainant claimed that the allegations in some evaluations were untrue and likely to damage his reputation and standing. The Data Protection Authority rejected the complaint on the grounds of inadmissibility. In its opinion, the recourse to the data protection authority was inadmissible because an ordinary court was already dealing with the same matter. Does the online platform violate the rights of the data subject under the GDPR? In addition, is there an obligation for the platform to delete all data which use does not comply with the provisions of the GDPR, in particular the complainant's entire doctor profile including all evaluations, and is the platform obliged to refrain from any further processing of the data? In its decision, the Administrative Court agrees with the reasoning of the Supreme Court, according to which the parallelism of legal protection options is permissible under the GDPR, which is directly applicable in Austria, and the circumstance of parallel recour