Alisdair Cameron Limited – Court Ruling (United Kingdom, 2024)

A data subject working in the property investment sector hired gardening company Alisdair Cameron Limited (ACL) to carry out landscaping and gardening services on one of its properties. A contractual dispute arose between the data subject and the owner, which resulting in several disagreements over the phone. During some of these conversations, the data subject made threats of violence towards the owner and his family. At the suggestion of a family member, the owner recorded some of their calls. The data subject was not aware that the calls were being recorded. The owner of the company shared the recordings of the phone calls with several employees, family members and friends. He stated that he did so to inform others about the threats out of concern for his and his family’s safety. Several of them in turn shared the recordings with others, resulting in a total of 15 people having access. The owner of ACL explicitly requested each person who he knew to have received the recording to not forward the recording and to delete it. However, the recordings somehow ended up in the hands of some of the data subject’s competitors in the property investment industry (without the owner of the gardening company’s knowledge). Upon learning of this, the data subject made access requests to the gardening company, the owner and various of the gardening company’s employees. The owner argued that he was not a controller and thus was not required to respond to the access request. The gardening company did respond to the request, but it refused to provide the identities of individual recipients and only disclosed the categories of recipients. The data subject made a claim under the [https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/contents UK GDPR] and [https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/schedule/2 Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018)] for an order that ACL and the owner comply with the access requests. The case raised four key questions before the King's Bench Division of the High