They were online sale

Thousands of freelancers in Spain have seen how their personal data (including their NIF, address or telephone number) circulated With total impunity By business databases, and could be bought by third parties for commercial purposes.

A resolution of the Spanish Agency for Data Protection (AEPD) has put a brake on this practice, ordering the mass deletion of the records of these autonomous and the immediate cessation of the commercial use of your data.

AEPD warning to the Chamber of Commerce. In A statement From the AEPD, the agency has expressly prohibited the Chamber of Commerce of Spain sharing the personal data of self -employed professionals with companies such as Camedata, reports D&B, Iberinform International and Datacentric.

With this measure, the AEPD seeks to protect the right to privacy Of the self -employed stating that the data managed by the Chambers of Commerce have as the sole legal purpose to serve institutional functions as representative public bodies and business promotion, but “it has not been designed as a source of economic advertising or as an open database for other uses” and considers that its commercial use is not collected in the law as a legitimate interest.

THE ORIGIN OF THIS DATA. When an autonomous professional begins his activity, he must register in the census of economic activities of the Tax Agency. In that census, data such as the NIF are included, the postal address in which the activity is developed (or its fiscal domicile), as well as contact data.

In compliance with Law 4/2014Finance gives access to this data to the Chamber of Commerce, through Camedata, with the aim of using them for the development of statistics and companies to support companies. The problem is that, as they are unipersonal companies, in most cases the postal address, the tax identification number or the contact data of the companies coincide with the personal data of the autonomous.

Public access for commercial purposes. The AEPD statement considers proven that private platforms with commercial interests such as D&B, Iberinform Internacional and Datacentric, had access to self -employed data listings, and segmented them by offering them to their respective clients in exchange for economic remuneration.

So now, he has ordered the immediate elimination of all the personal information of the self -employed “until they have a basis for legitimation.” According to estimates of the XNET platform, around one million freelancers were at risk of seeing their personal data published and marketed on the Internet.

An investigation of more than three years. The complaint that has given rise to this resolution It was presented in 2022 by the XNET Digital Rights Defense Platform. This organization discovered that it was the Chamber of Commerce itself that facilitated the violation of rights to transfer the data of the self -employed to private companies for commercial exploitation without knowledge nor the consent of those affected.

Xnet’s investigation showed that, in some cases, the platforms continued to offer self -employed data that had already been discharged, which further aggravated the exposure and risk of exposing the personal data of thousands of people.

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Image | Chamber of Commerce, UNSPLASH (Rashed Paykary)