German property company Deutsche Wohnen has been hit with a staggering data protection fine for hanging onto a treasure trove of personal and financial data of former and current housing tenants.
The firm was fined 14.5 million (approximately 12.5 million) after German data protection investigators found it had been holding information in an archival system from which it was impossible to delete records.
This highly sensitive data, which belonged to former and current tenants, included salary information, extracts from employment and training contracts, tax and health insurance records, as well as bank statements.
This data was stored in the system on an indiscriminate basis, according to German data protection authorities, and without appropriate consents. There was also no legally-defined basis for collecting and storing the data.
Deutsche Wohnen was found to have violated the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) under Article 25 (1), which covers the need for businesses to ensure they're adhering to data protection principles such as data minimisation. The firm also violated Article 5, which related to the core ethical principles related to processing data.
Businesses are instructed under GDPR not to keep personal data beyond the legally-established reasons they have identified, and for a period no longer than is required in order to carry out the processing.
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The German property firm was first warned about its archive system in 2017, according to the data regulator, and requested to change its archiving system as a matter of urgency.
Although the firm changed the archive system in March 2019, the changes still did not establish a lawful basis for storing the personal data and GDPR proceedings were launched, spanning the period between May 2018, when GDPR came into force, and this point.
The initial financial penalty was actually much higher, at roughly 28 million (24 million) based on the firm's annual turnover at more than a billion euros. GDPR fines can fall anywhere in the order of 20 million, or up to 4% of a firm's annual turnover, depending on the severity of the violation.
This initial fine represented 2.8% of the firm's turnover but was reduced because the company had actually taken concrete steps towards correcting its data storage mechanisms, and co-operated with regulators during the process.
IT Pro approached the property giant for its response to the GDPR fine.
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