Interesting judgment from Germany regarding the scope of the right of access – and in particular the extent to which the rights of others (here: a person making a statement) are taken into account to exclude (or not) certain information from the scope of a response. In this particular case, the Labour Court found that allegations by coworkers *did* have to be provided because the rights of the data subject outweighed those of those coworkers, due to the fact that there were untrue allegations being made.
As Carlo Piltz notes, this doesn’t mean that all comments regarding a person have to be provided along with the identity of the individuals making those comments – but the Labour Court here appears to have focussed on the fact that the allegations themselves were untrue.
I wonder whether this means that the Labour Court would have been in favour of a two-step approach:
– first, providing the comments while protecting the identity of the persons making the comments (to the extent possible);
– then, if a given comment is shown to be untrue, providing the identity of the person in question.
Otherwise anyone could simply allege that all things said about them are untrue and that way get access to all information, “other people’s rights be damned”.
I know I’ll be reading the judgment attentively!
GDPR data protection privacy
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