Court case 3 L 763/22.NW – Court Ruling (Germany, 2022)

In 2022, the German Federal Statistical Office, the controller, ran the 2022 census. As part of the census 2022, it also conducted a building and housing census (GWZ). In this vein, the controller requested information about the property of the data subjects in June 2022, which the latter did not comply with. The data is collected via an online form on the official Census 2022 homepage or via a paper form that is thereupon digitalized by a third party. In July 2022, the data subjects requested information about the data processing of the controller via Article 15 GDPR. Among other things, the data subjects wanted to know if the personal data would be processed in a third country. The data subjects opposed the data collection, claiming that the collected personal data was not sufficiently protected and that the incorporation of Cloudflare was not in line with the Schrems II judgment of the CJEU. In its response, the controller clarified that all collected data is exclusively processed by servers of the Federal Statistical Office. The integration of the company Cloudflare within the official Census 2022 homepage concerns only the generally accessible information and its functionality. In September 2022, the data subject filed a suit, claiming that, among other things, that the collected personal data was not sufficiently protected. Especially the incorporation of Cloudflare into the official Census 2022 was not in line with the Schrems II judgment by the CJEU. Collection of data The court held that the request by the defendant to provide information concerning the building and housing census did not violate the provisions of data protection law and was compatible with the provisions of the GDPR. The collection of data within the framework of the Census 2022 served the performance of a task in the public interest. The Census 2022 is a federal statistic and therefore a prerequisite for political decisions, to continuously collect, process, present and analyse da