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Deutsche Wohnen headquarters in Berlin: no fine despite data protection violations
Photo: FABRIZIO BENSCH / REUTERS
For the time being, Deutsche Wohnen does not have to pay a million-dollar fine for misusing tenant data.
The Berlin district court has found the decision of the Berlin data protection officer to be ineffective, as a court spokeswoman announced.
The criminal chamber stopped the proceedings against the Dax group.
The Berlin data protection officer Maja Smoltczyk issued a fine of 14.5 million euros against the largest private landlord in Berlin in autumn 2019 - the highest fine in Germany to date based on the General Data Protection Regulation.
She criticized the fact that tenants' personal data, some of which were years old, such as social and health insurance data, employment contracts or information about their financial circumstances, were in the company's archives.
They could still have been viewed and processed.
As a rule, these were documents that prospective tenants had to present to prove their creditworthiness before signing a rental contract, such as proof of income, Schufa information, employment contracts.
By law, these documents must be destroyed when the rental agreement is concluded.
The real estate company has apparently renounced that.
Fine notice have "serious defects"
Deutsche Wohnen is one of the largest German real estate companies.
It holds around 163,000 apartments and commercial units, almost three quarters of them in Berlin.
The group had lodged an objection to the fine and announced that no data from tenants had been passed on to third parties outside the company in breach of data protection.
In addition, "extensive personnel and process changes were initiated in 2017 in order to fully meet the current data protection requirements".
The court now found that the fine could not be the basis of the proceedings due to serious deficiencies.
Because it did not contain any information on specific acts of an organ of the company and was therefore ineffective.
The data protection officer has not yet announced whether she will lodge a complaint against the decision.
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hej / dpa
