Schufa has begun deleting the data of 20 million cell phone customers – as data protection advocates have been demanding for years. However, consumer lawyers fear that the deletion could make it more difficult for customers to sue.
Schufa has surprisingly announced that it will delete the data of 20 million cell phone customers starting today, thereby fulfilling a request made by data protection officers a good two years ago. This was decided together with the telecommunications companies affected.
The state and federal supervisory authorities had already decided in September 2021 that mobile phone providers such as Vodafone and Telekom were not allowed to pass on customers’ contract data to credit reporting agencies such as Schufa without their consent.
According to Schufa, the transmission of such data was stopped at the beginning of 2022, but the existing data has not been deleted – until now.
Causeless Mass storage
As usual, Schufa did not record the fact that someone did not pay their cell phone bill or even cheated the provider. Rather, information was collected about virtually all cell phone owners, regardless of whether it is reliable or not.
Among other things, it was stored who had which contract and for how long. Schufa and telecommunications companies had repeatedly emphasized that this was important to prevent fraud. Schufa also used such data to calculate consumers’ ability to pay, the so-called creditworthiness.
However, consumer advocates have repeatedly criticized the fact that the use of this data is not transparent and that it could also be used to the detriment of those affected.
Court rulings in favor of data protection officers
The companies concerned had always rejected the data protection authorities’ decision from 2021 – pointing out that it was only a “legal opinion” of the data protection officers and that it was not binding. In their opinion, the data should certainly be stored – to prevent fraud.
However, initial court rulings recently proved the data protection officers right. In April of this year, the Munich Regional Court ruled that the mobile phone provider Telefónica O2 should not have transmitted a customer’s contract data to Schufa without their consent. The O2 customer had sued with the support of the North Rhine-Westphalia consumer center. The verdict is not yet legally binding.
In any case, deleting the data is a good step for data protection and consumers, a representative of the North Rhine-Westphalia consumer advice center told the news portal heise.de about Schufa’s decision.
Irritation about the timing of the action
In fact, a year-long dispute could now be brought to an end. Two Cologne law firms are still confused about the timing of the deletion. At the beginning of October they announced that they wanted to file thousands of lawsuits against the mobile phone providers – because of illegal data transfer to Schufa.
It was said that consumers could receive up to 5,000 euros in compensation. According to the law firms, the first lawsuits have already been filed.
Those affected need a copy of their data
In order to actually be able to sue, those affected need a so-called data copy from Schufa, which states that their cell phone contract data is actually stored there. Now the lawyers fear that this information will be missing in the future.
Lawyer Christian Solmecke doesn’t really believe in coincidence, he says, especially since the deletion action came only shortly after the announcement that he would sue over data storage. The credit agency has received 10,000 such data copies in the past few weeks, but we are still waiting for 40,000 more.
A Schufa spokeswoman said NDR and “Süddeutscher Zeitung” said that their company answers such inquiries “within the statutory deadline”, which is four weeks. She did not want to comment on the suspicion that there might be a connection between the deletion operation and the threatened wave of lawsuits.
Schufa is providing information for the first time
For the first time, Schufa provided information on how cell phone contract data has influenced Schufa scores, i.e. the assessment of consumers’ creditworthiness.
So far, the company has always been tight-lipped here. Now it says on schfa.de: “Our analyzes prior to deletion have shown that the scores only change marginally on average. For 53 percent of people, the score will be lower after deletion, and for 47 percent it will be higher (the higher the better ).”
They only looked at the impact on the bank score, “the score most often provided by Schufa for credit decisions”.
2023-10-21 13:14:04
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