Forfeiture of the right to information under data protection law?

Everyone has the right to find out what data a company has stored about their person from which sources and has passed on to third parties. But what is the situation with this right to information under data protection law if the data subject themselves publicly provides their email address on the internet? The Local Court (AG) Leipzig had to decide on this matter.

A lawyer had been invited by the organizer per email to the Hessian Medical Law Day. The lawyer subsequently demanded from the organizer the submission of a declaration under penalty of contempt and information about what data was stored and for what purpose, where it came from and to whom it was transmitted. The organizer's response was that the lawyer would be removed from the distribution list regarding future events and that his name and address had been obtained from the internet. The lawyer was not satisfied with this response. He sued to enforce the statutory right to information.

The Court's Decision

In its judgment of 18.07.2014 – Az. 10 C 2154/14, the Local Court (AG) Leipzig questioned whether the lawyer had a right to information under data protection law at all. Because he had himself publicly made his email address known on the internet and thus enabled access to this data. The court decided that he himself would have known where the organizer had obtained his email address from. Regarding the lawyer's request for information as to which third parties his data may possibly have been passed on to, the court stated that the organizer had already implicitly denied in its response a transmission of data to third parties. This point would also be irrelevant because third parties could obtain the email address from the internet at any time. In the court's view, there was no case in which confidential personal data could be passed on to third parties.

Conclusion

If someone publicly makes their data known on the internet, for example through a business directory entry, they may forfeit their right to information under data protection law or parts thereof.