Court case W176 2265088-1 – Court Ruling (Austria, 2023)

A data subject submitted a request to the controller, a credit agency, to delete personal data relating to her. The data in question referred to three debts in the amounts of around €24, €35 and €1,000 which she had paid off by the time the complaint was filed. The controller responded that it would not delete such data and submitted that its processing activities relate to credit data which is relevant for establishing creditworthiness of data subjects on the basis of Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, as it has a legitimate interest to provide third parties, whose activities entail a credit risk, with accurate credit data. For these third parties it is essential to consult the database provided by the controller, in order to be able to assess the payment behavior of their potential contractual partners, such as the data subject in this case. The controller claimed that it is important to keep data relating to, among others, unpaid bills in their database, as they significantly increase the chances of future default and thus constitute relevant credit data. For the sake of accuracy under Article 5(1)(d) GDPR, the controller submitted that it is important to also keep records of debts that have been paid off, in fact, if the controller were to delete data relating to already settled debts of the data subject, this would create a distorted picture of her creditworthiness. In this case, the data subject had been sent several reminders by creditors before she actually settled her debts, whereby the creditors had to put debt recovery measures in place and suffered temporary damages from the unpaid bills. In the present case, the debts had been settled in 2019 and 2020, after being left unpaid for about three years. On 5 August 2022, the data subject brought a complaint with the DSB following the refusal by the controller to delete credit data relating to her, claiming also that the controller failed to inform her that data relating to her credit history were being saved for up to