(School)Teacher – Court Ruling (Austria, 2021)

The complainant, a teacher working in the profession for 20 years, appeared in a smartphone-app on which both schools and teachers are evaluated by students. The app lists the personal information of the teachers, including their name, academic degree, office title, profession and the associated school. The teacher filed a complaint with the Austrian supervisory authority, alleging a violation of their right to confidentiality and requesting a pseudonymisation of the name. The operator of the app stated that evaluations only refer to the professional and not the private activities of the complainant. In this regard, the processing activities had been approved for legality and admissibility by the supervisory authority in an official procedure. Moreover, the personal data of the complainant was publicly available on the school’s website anyway. The supervisory authority dismissed the complaint, arguing that the interests of the general public and students were to be valued higher than those of the teachers concerned. In this regard, the processing also serves the exercise of their right to freedom of expression and information under [https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:12012P/TXT&from=EN Articles 10, 11 ECFR]. The complainant appealed the decision. The court upheld the position of the authority that the interest of the public in greater transparency in education and in improving the quality of education and teaching outweighs the confidentiality interests of the teacher. A pseudonymisation of the teacher’s names would limit these purposes. The appeal of the complainant was therefore dismissed. The court argued that the design and safeguards established by the app are sufficient to deal with the teacher’s concerns. The App relates exclusively to the professional sphere of the teacher’s life and evaluations are made only via predefined criteria that do not allow for free text or personal attacks. Furthermore, the evaluations are only displayed when an higher amount evaluations are collected. As an additional safeguard, all students are verified via their telephone numbers minimizing the risk of multiple reviews.