Court case 13 U 84/19 – Court Ruling (Germany, 2022)

The data subject is a user of the social media platform F (controller). The controller was of the opinion that two comments posted by the data subject violated the terms and conditions ("F's Community Standards"). As a consequence, the controller deleted the two comments and restricted the abilities of the data subject's profile temporarily. It also made a note of haven taken these measures against the data subject in case of future violations. The data subject filed a law suit against the controller. In this law suit the data subject requested, among others: 1. that the controller will be ordered to restore the two comments, 2. that the measures of the controller will be declared illegal, 3. that injunctive relief will be granted, 4. that the controller will be ordered to rectify the data so that the existence of a breach of the terms is deleted from the record and the counter recording the number of breaches is reset and 5. that damages will be awarded. The Regional Court Hannover dismissed the claim of the data subject entirely. The data subject appealed this decision. The appellate court - the Higher Regional Court Celle (Oberlandesgericht Celle - OLG Celle) - amended the judgement and granted the requests 1-3, but still denied the requests for rectification (4) and damages (5). After establishing that the data subject did not violate the terms and conditions, the court focused primarily on the application for rectification. The court concluded that the note of the controller about the deletion of the comments and the restriction of the account is not "inaccurate" data according to Article 16 GDPR, because the deletion and restriction of the account have indeed taken place. Furthermore, the court found that there is no indication that the controller actually stores a note in which it deems its measures to "have been proven lawful"[explicitly phrased this way by the court - see Comments on this]. The court further reasoned that even if the controller would have stored such a note, the data subject would still have no right to rectification under Article 16 GDPR, because the content would be a legal assessment and not a fact. The court concluded that legal assessments are opinions and opinions of private persons are, as far as they do not contain any factual elements, excluded from the scope of Article 16 GDPR because of the freedom of speech. The court then clarified that the controller's opinion would obviously have no legal effect. Only the court's ruling in the context of the application for a declaration (application 2 of the claim) has a binding legal effect on the question of the (un)lawfulness of the controller's measures. Regarding the application for damages, the court determined that the data subject is not entitled to damages under sentence 1 of Article 82(2) GDPR because the controller's measures - regardless of their contractual permissibility - did not constitute a violation of the GDPR. The court found that the data subject consented to the processing of the data. It, eventually, reasoned that the controller's breach of contract itself (the unlawful deletion of the comments) does not make the processing of the data unlawful.