THE BERLIN DPA FINES DEUTSCHE WOHNEN SE 14,5 MILLION EUROS

5 November 2019

The Berlin DPA (Berlin Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information - Berliner Beauftragter für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit) has announced a press release today that they fined Deutsche Wohnen SE ( -which is one of the leading publicly listed real estate companies in Germany and Europe) 14,5 million Euros for not taking proper measures relating to the storage/retention/deletion system of their customer data.  

According to the examinations held in June 2017 and March 2019 in the Company by the DPA, they were detected that;

• storing the personal data relating to the tenants in the archive system was not required for their business purposes and there was not any system foreseen to erase unnecessary data (in light of the principle of purpose limitation).
• those data in the archive system included personal and financial relations of the tenants, such as salary statements, employment contracts, self-disclosure forms, tax data, health insurance data, bank account statements etc.

In addition to the sanctioning of the structural violation, the DPA imposed further fines of between 6000 Euros and 17,000 Euros for the unproper storage of personal data of tenants in 15 specific cases.

You can find the press release (in German) here.  

Should you have any queries and/or remarks, please do not hesitate to contact us. 

Kind regards,

Zumbul Attorneys-at-Law

info@zumbul.av.tr