Court case 6 O 2465/23 – Court Ruling (Germany, 2024)

The controller is a credit rating agency, which provides information on the creditworthiness of individuals to its partners. This is done by calculating a credit score reflecting the probability of the person fulfilling credit-relevant contracts, based on collected information and past experience of the data subject. The data subject argued that the credit score calculated by the controller would have negative effects on them make the conclusion of contracts difficult for them. The data subject further argued that the credit scoring by the controller was in violation of Article 22(1) GDPR. The data subject therefore claimed injunctive relief at the Regional Court Traunstein (“Landsgericht Traunstein”). The data subject also claimed non-material damages of at least € 5,000 from the controller due to unlawful and discriminatory processing of their personal data when calculating the credit score. This included using their address, age and gender for calculating the credit score by the controller. Furthermore, the data subject argued that their right of access under Article 15(1)(h) GDPR was not fulfilled. The data subject requested the court to order the controller to provide information on the specific manner the credit score was calculated, including the calculation method used, the personal characteristics of the data subject used for the calculation, the various risk classes and how they are categorized, the weighting of categories of criteria and of individual criteria in relation to each other that most strongly influence the final credit score and more. The controller argued that besides providing the credit score to its partners, it also provides the information on which the score calculation is based. The data subject was able to conclude various credit-relevant contracts in the recent past even after the controller provided credit scores to the potential contractual partners of the data subject. The controller argued that the data subject’s claims were gen