Court case 25 K 2138/19 – Court Ruling (Germany, 2022)
General GDPR enforcement action
This case relates to broader data protection obligations, not specifically to cookie or consent banner compliance. It is not included in cookie statistics or the Risk Calculator.
A court in Germany ruled that a municipality did not have to update a man's address records from the 1980s. The court found that the man did not prove why the old data was incorrect or why updating it mattered. This case highlights the importance of maintaining accurate records and the challenges of changing historical data.
What happened
A German court dismissed a man's request to update his address records from the 1980s.
Who was affected
The case affected a man who wanted his old address records updated by a municipality.
What the authority found
The court decided that the man's claim was unsubstantiated and partly his own fault for not keeping his records updated.
Why this matters
This ruling shows that individuals must provide clear reasons and evidence when seeking to change old records. It also underscores the difficulty of altering archived data without a strong justification.
GDPR Articles Cited
National Law Articles
In March 2019, the data subject requested rectification of his registered address from the controller, a municipality. According to him, he had lived at different addresses in the 1980s which did not show up in the record. The controller refused, arguing that it had no further data about the data subject and that the file had been archived already, meaning that it could not be edited anymore. In April 2019, the data subject brought an action against the controller in court. He argued that the controller had no good reason or legal basis to refuse the rectification. The controller claimed that the data subject had not proven that the data were inaccurate. Since the dates concerned were over 30 years in the past, it had no obligation to keep further documents or records since the retention periods had expired in the meantime. Furthermore, the data subject had violated his obligation to register every relocation which would have allowed a correct and seamless documentation of this information. The Administrative Court of Cologne (Verwaltungsgericht Köln - VG Köln) dismissed the data subject's claim. Initially, the court discussed whether the claim was inadmissible because it doubted that the data subject had a legitimate interest for legal relief in the first place. Such interest does not exist when the lawsuit can obviously not bring a plaintiff any legal or factual advantages. It criticised that the data subject had not substantiated why he had an interest in the rectification of data older than 30 years. It further agreed with the controller that it was partly the the data subject's own fault that the register was not up to date because he himself failed to comply with his obligations to re-register after each relocation. However, the court did not finally decide on the admissibility because it found the claim to be unsubstantiated anyhow. First, the court established that the only basis for the data subject's claim was Article 16 GDPR, as [https://www.gesetze
Outcome
Court Ruling
A ruling by a national court on a data-protection matter.
Related Cases (0)
No other cases found for Court case 25 K 2138/19 in DE
This is the only recorded case for this entity in this jurisdiction.
Details
About this data
Cite as: Cookie Fines. Court case 25 K 2138/19 - Germany (2022). Retrieved from cookiefines.eu
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