The President of the Personal Data Protection Office (“The President of the Office”) imposed first administrative fine of PLN 40,000 on a public entity for failure to comply with the GDPR. The reason for imposing the fine was that the mayor of the city did not conclude a personal data processing agreement with the entities to which he transferred data.
The data processing agreement was not concluded with a company whose servers hosted the resources of the Public Information Bulletin (BIP) of the City Hall in Aleksandrów Kujawski. Such an agreement was also not concluded with another company, which provided software to create BIP and provided service in this area. The President of the Office concluded that Article 28 (3) of the GDPR had been violated. This provision obliges the controller, on behalf of whom personal data processing is performed by another entity, to conclude data processing agreement with him.
As a consequence of the absence of such an agreement, the mayor committed the act of sharing personal data without a legal basis, which violated the principle of lawfulness of processing (Article 5(1)(a) of the GDPR) and the principle of confidentiality (Article 5(1)(f) of the GDPR).
However, these are not the only violations established during the control procedure conducted by the President of the Office. It was also found that there were no internal procedures in place to review the resources available in the BIP in order to determine the timing of their publication. This caused, for example, that in the BIP the property declarations from 2010 were available, among others, while the period of their storage is 6 years, which results from the sectoral regulations. n. In the case of data whose retention period is not regulated by law, the controller should determine it himself in accordance with the purposes for which he is processing them. Therefore, the controller violated the principle of storage limitation, set forth in Article 5(1)(e) of the GDPR.
It was also established during the investigation that the recorded materials from the city council meetings were available in the BIP only through a link to a dedicated YouTube channel. There were no back-up copies of these recordings at the Municipal Office. Thus, in case of loss of data stored on YouTube, the controller would not have at his disposal the recordings. No risk analysis was carried out for the publication of recordings from board meetings exclusively on YouTube. Thus, the principles of integrity and confidentiality were infringed (Article 5(1)(f) of the GDPR) as well as the principle of accountability (Article 5(2) of the GDPR).
The principle of accountability was also breached in connection with the shortcomings in the register of processing activities. For example, it did not indicate all data recipients, nor did it indicate the planned date of data deletion for certain processing activities.
When imposing a penalty, the President of the Office took into account the fact that despite the irregularities found in the course of the proceedings, the controller did not remove them or implement solutions aimed at preventing future infringements. The controller also did not cooperate with the supervisory authority. Therefore, the President of the Office decided that there were no premises that could mitigate the amount of the fine.
Apart from the financial penalty, the President of the Office also ordered the controller to take action to remedy the relevant infringements within 60 days.
To read the full press release in Polish, click here
For further information, please contact the Polish DPA: kancelaria@uodo.gov.pl