La Quadrature du Net – Court Ruling (France, 2020)

On May 13th, 2019 the French government adopted a decree 2019-452 allowing the creation of a common biometric authentication system for several government and public service websites applicationshttps://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000038475477/. This system is part of the FranceConnect project which allows to login public service websites using your login and password of another public service websitehttps://franceconnect.gouv.fr/. The french organization La Quadrature du Net (LQDN) which promotes digital rights and defends freedom of citizens challenged the legality of the decree. The organization argued that the decree is not based on a lawful consent as described in article 4(11) and article 7(4) GDPR and required in article article 9(2)(a) when dealing with sensitive data. LQDN also argued that the data collection was disproportionate to the purpose of the processing. On this topic, LQDN asked the Conseil d'Etat to refer two preliminary questions to the CJEU: *Should the assessment of the validity of the consent be made at the level of each service subject to personal data processing, independently of the existence of another "equivalent" service or at the level of all "equivalent services"? *Are the biometric data collected and processed by a mobile application using facial recognition technology for authentication purposes from certain public services and their partners adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purposes for which they are collected and processed? Lastly, LQDN claimed that the decree was adopted in violation of the procedure required in the then [https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/article_lc/LEGIARTI000037090141/2019-05-12 section 27] of the law n° 78-17 Informatique & Libertés (since replaced by [https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/article_lc/LEGIARTI000037822860 article 31(II)]) and [https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/article_lc/LEGIARTI000006527486/2019-07-01 section 22] of the French 1958 Constitution. Does the