Court case 6 U 127/24 – Court Ruling (Germany, 2024)

The controller is a credit rating agency. Its contractual partners provide it with information relevant to the database from their business relationships with their customers. The controller stores this information as entries in its database in order to be able to provide its contractual partners with information. The data subject had previously initiated court procedures against the controller about the legality of the so-called score value, which the controller determines on the basis of the data available to it and which is intended to assess the creditworthiness of the person concerned. With regard to this procedure, the controller imposed a so-called score block until its conclusion, with the consequence that no more credit score values are transmitted in the event of a corresponding query by the controller's contractual partners. This can lead to difficulties for the data subject, e.g. for entering into new contracts. The data subject challenged the block imposed by the controller on the data subject of the database for the provision of information on contractual partners with the application to lift the so-called "score block" and to refrain from a future block until the decision in the main action. The Court of first instance dismissed the application for a preliminary injunction. The data subject's appealed this, seeking the court, to order the controller to immediately to lift the block imposed on the applicant of the database for the provision of information on contractual partners, the so-called "score block". The court stated, the data subject is only entitled to the rights of data subjects under Chapter III of the GDPR. The court found, that the data subject seeks the (re)commencement of the processing of personal data by the controller in the form of scoring and the transmission of the scoring value to third parties which is not listed in Chapter III. Thus, the court found, that the GDPR did not provide a legal basis for it's claim. The cour