The regional court of Berlin recently issued an order against Apple Sales International preventing it from relying on eight of its existing standard data protection clauses which it used in its Terms and Conditions for its online store, as well as it privacy policy. The future reliance and use of these clauses by Apple in Germany was also prohibited by the Court. Provisions relied upon by the Court for its judgment were found in a variety of German Statutes, such as the Federal Data Protection Act, the Telemedia Act, the Telecommunications Act as well as the German Act Against Unfair Competition. The case was brought by a consumer rights group.
The eight provisions at issue were the following:
- the sharing of personal data within Apple’s group of companies and the combination with other data to offer services, content or advertisements;
- the use and sharing of personal data relating to the customer’s family and friends;
- the use of personal data in the context of product announcements, software updates and events, as well as in the context of service, content or advertisement improvement;
- the use of personal data to develop, offer and enhance services, content and advertisements;
- the use of personal data for internal purposes such as data analytics and research to improve products, services and customer communications;
- the sharing of personal data with third parties in the context of serving or improving advertisements;
- the sharing of personal data with third party subcontractors in the context of data processing services, customer data management, evaluation of customer interest, customer research and surveys; and
- the collection and use of location data by Apple and its service providers in the context of location-based products.
Notable about this judgment was the fact that the Court held that for the purposes of German data protection law, even “anonymized” location data can, in certain circumstances, constitute personal data. More predictably, the Court ruled that a pre-checked box by which the customer “opted in” to receive advertisements violated Germany’s Act Against Unfair Competition.
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- Competition Law and Personal Data: Preliminary Thoughts on a Complex Issue (lawprofessors.typepad.com)
- German court rules against Apple data privacy terms (electronista.com)
- More on the Global Internet Privacy Sweep (dataprivacyandsecuritylaw.com)
- How to manage the privacy settings in OS X (reviews.cnet.com)
- Germany Highlights Privacy by Invalidating Apple User Agreement (macobserver.com)
- Apples Customer Data-Privacy Rules Struck Down by German Court (bloomberg.com)
- Berlin court: Apple’s privacy policy violates German data protection law (macworld.com)
- Berlin Court Strikes Down Apple’s Customer Privacy Rules (pcmag.com)
