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Final Decision
Details of case
National file number PS/00416/2019
IMI Case Register number 72167
Controller MIRACLIA TELECOMUNICACIONES, S.L.
Complainant and
Legal references 6, 13 y 14 GDPR
Administrative fine / 40.000 € and requirement of adaptation to data protection
penalty imposed regulations
1054-0319
Summary of the complaint
The complainant filed a complaint with the Spain-SA against MIRACLIA // The complaint
lodged by has been transmitted to the Spain-SA
according to provisions of Article 56.1 of the General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR).
The complaint claim the use of personal data to make a joke using the “Juasapp”
application, by means of a telephone call to his mobile line 639610479 in which a person
pretended to be a police officer, which took place on 09/01 / 2018. For this reason, he
denounces the recording made without his knowledge or consent, the dissemination of
said recording to third parties, also without his consent, and that the call is made from a
hidden number. He adds that the line enabled as a contact by that company has an
additional rate, which entails a cost for the interested party who intends to contact it. He
states that he has a copy of the recording, which was provided to him by the person who
used the services of MIRACLIA and requests that his data be cancelled, as well as the
opening of a sanctioning procedure.
This claim was transferred to the entity MIRACLIA. In response to what was
stated by the claimant, MIRACLIA informs this Agency that the joke to which the claimant
refers is not included in the “Juasapp” application, in whose catalog of jokes th ere is none
that has to do with police officers.
Regarding the processing of personal data, it indicates that it does not store data
of the subject subjected to the joke (hereinafter, also, interested party or person who
receives the joke call): neither recordings nor telephone, which will be on the joker's
mobile device (hereinafter, also, user of the application or person who orders the prank
call); limiting itself to providing a service to the user of the application (the joker) who
chooses the joke, enters the recipient's phone number and, after accepting the terms
and conditions, generates the recording. MIRACLIA, therefore, has no way of knowing if
the claimant has received a joke from "Juasapp" (it warns that there are other similar
applications), and it can only block the telephone line number of the person who have
received the joke call, even without knowing if he has actually received the joke, or delete
the URL of the recording if they had it, which does not happen in this case as it was not
been provided by .
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According to MIRACLIA, it is the joker who can erase the recording, so the
claimant's request must be addressed to him. The entity's action, which does not identify
the abused people, consists of preventing the recipient of the joke from receiving more
calls in the future, blocking the phone, or proceeding to delete the recording using the
URL of the joke, which does not carry any associated telephone, and provided that the
joker has not previously done so.
The user of the application or joker is warned on two occasions about the
responsibility that the recording entails.
Finally, MIRACLIA informs that since the full application of Regulation (EU)
2016/679, of the European Parliament and of the Council, of 04/27/2 016, regarding the
Protection of Natural Persons with regard to the Processing of Personal Data already
The Free Circulation of these Data (hereinafter RGPD), has modified its operation in
order not to keep any type of data, leaving these on the users' pho nes, being impossible
to identify the person who receives the joke call. In the event that the latter, the person
who receives the joke call, provide his line number, they could be blocked so that they
do not receive calls in the future.
On 07/04/2019, a claim filed by (hereinafter
claimant 2), against the entity MIRACLIA, noted, like claimant 1, that it has been the
subject of a joke (thanks for her vote to Vox) that was been recorded and disseminated
by social networks with the mention of her name, carried out using the application
"Juasapp" (provides the link to the audio object of the complaint - "http: // juasapp .mobi:
8080 / ... ”, which allows access to the audio corresponding to the call). She request the
removal of her mobile phone line number on which she received the call from the
database of the responsible company and the removal of the audio from the network.
She also denounces that xenophobic messages are made from the supposed
“association of friends of Vox”.
Competence
Pursuant to Article 56 (1), paragraphs 2 and 4 of Article 58, and Article 60 of GDPR, and
in accordance with Article 48 (1) and 64 of the Constitutional Act 3/2018 of 5 December
on Personal Data Protection, the Chair of the Spain-SA shall have competence to
ADOPT THIS FINAL DECISION
Investigation by Spain-SA
The Spain-SA has conducted an investigation to determine how personal data is
processed to make jokes.
1. Made a request for information to MIRACLIA on various aspects, on 06/25/2019 a
letter from said company was received at this Agency in which it makes the following
statements:
a) At the end of the joke call, the receiver listens to an announcement offering him the
possibility of not allowing the generation of the file with the recording of the joke. The
locution is as follows:
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"A friend of yours has played a joke on you. In case you do not want your friend
to listen, download or broadcast the joke, or in case you do not want to receive
more jokes, press 5 on your keyboard after the signal. Beeep "
They add that additionally, the joke can be deleted by knowing the url of the joke
recording and sending an email to [email protected] indicating that url.
b) Among other technical aspects, they indicate that, once the prank is programmed, the
call is initiated from the Voice over IP servers of MIRACLIA on the specified date and
time.
The joker user downloads the application and accepts its terms and conditions.
At that time, a user profile is generated to use a Voice over IP service and a
number is assigned to him, which is rented to you while you are a user of the
application and make each call. To use the application, choose a joke from the
catalog and enter the phone number of the joke recipient and program a date and
time, and the Voice over IP call leaves the cloud servers at that time that the user
has programmed the joke.
If the joking user selects to record the call (and the receiver does not choose the
option that it should not be recorded), an audio file will be generated with the
content of the joke call . The generated audio file is available at a URL to which
only the joker user of the application has access and only the joker on his device
where he has installed the application has that content associated with the phone
number of the recipient of the call, since Juasapp's servers do not store any
personal data of the recipient of the call.
c) In the terms and conditions of use of the application, joking users are informed that the
company could delete their profiles (including content / recordings) after 6 months of
non-use of the application.
2. In order to determine the exact operation of the application and the possible
variations incorporated into the application since the last claim, an inspector installed
the “Juasapp” application on his mobile terminal. The application consists of 3 tabs:
"List" (of available jokes), "Examples" and "My jokes". This last tab is where the jokes
made by the joker will be saved if they are not deleted.
It is verified that the list of available jokes includes jokes related to claimant 1 and
claimant 2.
3. On September 6, 9 and 12, 2019, the Agency's Inspection Services carried out
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tests consisting of downloading the “Juasapp” application on a mobile terminal and
proceeding to use it. As a result of these tests, the findings outlined in the Second
Proven Fact were obtained.
4. It has been found that the website “juasapp.es” offers a free and immediate system
to include a phone number in the list of blocked phones. According to MIRACLIA's
statement, the phone number is stored encrypted in its systems.
A test was carried out by registering the telephone number corresponding to a
second SIM of the inspector's terminal, and then a prank was attempted on this
telephone number. The application did not allow the execution of the joke.
5. Regarding the issue of the dissemination of the joke, which is present in the claims,
it must be clarified that MIRACLIA does not have any public site where they are
published or any platform for the dissemination of jokes. The jokes can only be
spread by the joker user by sending the link to the audio file: in the list of jokes made
by the joker, next to each of the jokes not eliminated by the receiver of the joke
following the indicated procedure, appears an icon to download the aud io file of the
recording of the phone conversation of the prank, another to listen to it and a third to
share it (the link to the audio file of the recording is sent through the means that has
been chosen to share it - this is the only time the joker knows the link to the audio
file).
6. On 08/26/2019, the Inspection Services access the website “juasapp.es”, at the
URL corresponding to the recording of the joke made on the claimant 2. It is verified
that using the right button They show different options, including playing and
downloading the recording.
Operational tests of the “Juasapp” application carried out as a result of previous actions
carried out by the Agency (file E / 02003/2018) have been incorporated into this
investigation. Regarding the treatment by MIRACLIA of the personal data of the recipient
of a joke, the conclusions of that previous investigation indicate the following:
I. Storage of the recipient's phone. The recipient's telephone number is stored in the
claimed systems until the moment the call is made. Prank calls can be instant or
scheduled by specifying execution date and time.
II. Recording the joke. It remains in the systems of the claimed one until the joker
decides to eliminate it. If the recipient of the joke decides to exercise his right of
deletion, he must know the web link to the joke. As a general rule the joke record
will be deleter in a period of time of 6 months of non-use of the application by the
user.
III. There are no other personal data of the addressee of the joke in the systems of the
claimed person in addition to those reflected in the previous points I and II.
An a sanction proposal was sent to MIRACLIA, indicating that its action could be
financially sanctioned, with a fine of 100,000 euros for infringement of articles 6 and 13-
14 of the RGPD.
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MIRACLIA submitted a brief of allegations in which the company requests the
reduction of the penalty referred to in the agreement to initiate the procedure, taking into
account the allegations made and the immediate measures adopted. It bases its request
on the following considerations:
1. As a preliminary matter, the aforementioned entity warns that it has been the
subject of several sanctioning procedures previously (due to the absence of consent
only), which are being reviewed before the Supreme Court, three of them already
formally admitted for processing and pending oral hearing . In these procedures, the
position of MIRACLIA in the personal relationship between joker and person who
receives the joke call is discussed when facilitating a means of leisure between
individuals, as well as the existence or not of personal data and the legal basis of the
treatment (the legitimate interest, depending on the entity) , otherwise the fact of playing
a joke would not be possible. It accompanies a copy of one of the appeals, which
summarizes, according to MIRACLIA, its arguments.
As a result of these cases, and the entry into force of the RGPD, it made a
modification of its systems to prevent the data from being stored on MIRACLIA's se rvers,
moving away the idea of "processing personal data" and betting, according to its
statements, for being a means of communication such as a telephone line. It is an
intermediary in a relationship between individuals, the user who plays the joke is
responsible for the information. He is also the one who enters the phone.
MIRACLIA indicates that it only provides security to the process, but is not capable
of identifying the abused or linking it to any other data; does not save the phone to which
the joke is directed does not associate it with the audio file, which is encrypted with a
code. It adds that it blocks the phone of the recipient of the joke when it requests not to
receive them, it deletes the recording when it is requested and it does not hav e lists of
telephone numbers of abomados, lists of recordings or similar.
It is something similar, says MIRACLIA, to what happens with Instagram or Twitter
when an individual takes a photo and uploads it to these social networks, which are not
responsible for these events and, at most, enable means to request the removal of
content . Nor does a company dedicated to sending surprise gifts have to ask the
recipient for prior permission. Otherwise, the activity would not be possible.
2. Regarding the claim made by claimant 1, he reiterates that the joke he refers to
does not appear in Juasapp's catalog of jokes.
Regarding the second claim, she states that the interested party did not go to the
entity to request the deletion of her data and that this request could be made from the
moment of the call or later, by having the URL with the recording. According to
MIRACLIA, this complaint shows that what is usually requested is the suppression of the
joke. In this case, almost three months passed, when on the same day the right could
have been satisfied.
3. About the tests carried out by the inspector:
- The recording is not materialized in an audio file with its corresponding URL
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until the user making the call confirms that he has accepted the Terms and Condit ions
for the second time and generates the audio file.
- The erasure of the jokes occurs with the sending of a DTMF tone during the call,
which the operators must guarantee its operation. Unfortunately in the VoIP world (which
is the technology with which operators provide the service of sending telephone calls
from Juasapp's servers), this is not always the case depending on the route that the call
has followed, which is behind of the instability that the system may have.
- The usability of deleting after holding down is something that MIRACLIA
considers intuitive because many messaging apps do it in the same way. It is already a
standard for the usability of smartphones.
- The phone number for programmed pranks is stuck with the call to be made.
When this is done, it disappears from the systems. At no time is the phone number and
the recording stored at the same time and place, which makes it impossible for there to
be an association between both data. The recording file is generated when the joker
accepts its generation, which only occurs when the call has ended and the abuser has
not pressed the 5 key. If the joker does not accept the generation of the recording, there
is no audio conversion in a file accessible via URL and, therefore, not even the user
could access the file. The audio would be a few bits in temporary memory without
generating a closed audio file.
4. On the operation of the application: the information and the legal basis that
legitimizes the data processing.
It questions whether the information can be considered personal data, since
MIRACLIA is unable to identify the abused in a simple way and without disproportionate
means, based on the mobile phone number or voice files (STS 2484/2019: “a natural
person it is not considered identifiable if such identification requires disproportionate
deadlines or activities ”). In this case, the only one who can identify the joked person is
the user and for MIRACLIA the recipient is anonymous.
Regarding the duty of information, it states the following:
MIRACLIA adopted additional measures to guarantee the security of the
information processed and that the telephone number was stored on the user's device
and not on the entity's servers. Initially, the telephone number of the abbreviated person
was stored to facilitate any request for information from the affected party, although,
according to MIRACLIA, in an irreversible encryption with sha-2 algorithm, avoiding the
use of the number for any action other than giving that support, since It could only be
recovered if someone (ex: the person that received the joke call himself) facilitated it.
At the same time, an informative note on data processing was included at the end
of the joke that, although it is true that the current phrase does not inform about
everything required in article 14 of the RGPD, it does indicate how to oppose the
treatment of data. data and its deletion (insists that it considers that it does not treat
personal data, but, "ad cautelam", informs and offers guarantees).
Likewise, in the privacy policy inserted in the web and in the Terms and
Conditions of the app, the following is reported:
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‘Miraclia does not collect data from the recipients of the jokes. Miraclia’s activity
is to provide a means of telecommunications to enable the owner of the telephone
downloading the app to choose a joke and to record it, with data relating to the recipient
of the call stored on the user’s own terminal without Miraclia retaining information on the
recipient’s telephone number. Miraclia provides a cloud storage service for the
customer’s audio files and at no time does it disseminate or share that information with
anyone, as it is private information of the app user.’
Moreover, in the context of the present proceedings, which were aware of the
complaint made for the first time in relation to the information defects, it immediately
remedied it by supplementing the information provided at the end of the conversation of
the joke as follows:
That someone has spent a joke to pass a good story.
The Juasapp application owned by MIRACLIA TELECOMUNICACIONES, S.L.
— To object to such a joke reaching the bromist and to remove it, you can click
on key 5.
— You have more information by clicking on key 1.
Clicking on key 1 provides the detailed explanation, also included on the website.
Thus, of the information which it did not provide to the data subject, it has now included:
The identity of MIRACLIA
— the contact details of the Data Protection Officer
— The retention period
— The basis for locus standi
— The exercise of the full rights guaranteed by opposition and deletion rights
(and also access rights when requested) are now formally specified.
This is a layered information included at the end of the conversation, in the Terms
and Conditions of the app, on the entity’s website and in the FAQ section. Please provide
the details of the information inserted in the “FAQ” section of the website:
‘12.- I do not want to receive more jokes. What do I do?
If you don’t want anyone to know again, it is enough for you to touch my number
in Bloquear and include the phone number. The phone number you enter will be blocked
on the platforms so that nobody can send you a joke from this app (or of course no other
action).The number is stored in the systems so that no one can retrieve that number for
future use.”
‘16.- How can I erase a joke?
The jokes are erased by pushing the finger for a few seconds on the joke in
question.”
It goes on to state that this does not mean that it is compatible with the
infringement or with the penalty, but since this is not a matter which has been neglected
in bad faith or with a view to evading compliance, it is immediately reinstated ‘ad caution’
with a view to remedying it.
On the legal basis of the data processing, it states the following:
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Consent cannot be the legal basis for spending a joke because it would
undermine the very fact of spending a joke or the surprise effect, as is also the case in
many cases, such as the sending of flowers or the uploading of friends’ photos to social
media. In the latter case, the rights to erasure and objection are guaranteed, but the
social network manager does not seek the consent of persons whose data are uploaded
by other users.
MIRACLIA therefore defends the merits of the legitimate interest as a basis for
standing under Article 6 (1) (f) GDPR.To this end, the required balancing test has been
carried out, following the recommendations of the previous Article 29 Working Party.
What is more, it has been assessed that the legal basis is the performance of the
contract between the user and MIRACLIA, but the person who receives the call is not a
party to that contract.
To this end, we enclose a report justifying the legitimate interest as a basis for
legitimising the processing of data and concluding that, apart from specific cases in which
the person who receives the call is disturbed (which are testimonial cases), there is no
risk to individuals because all security measures have been taken to ensure the security
of the process, because it is ensured that the joke is erased if the person receiving the
joke so requests, including telephone blocking.
Adds that the recording of a conversation between private individuals, where the
person recorded is one of the participants in the conversation, is not unlawful, as stated
by the Constitutional Court in its judgment of 29 November 1984, STC 11/1984, when it
provides, inter alia, that ‘Who recorded a conversation of others, irrespective of any other
consideration, the right conferred by Article 18.3 of the Constitu tion is observed; on the
other hand, a person who recorded a conversation with another person does not, by
virtue of that fact alone, engage in conduct contrary to the aforementioned constitutional
provision’.
In the case of Juasapp, the party issuing the call is aware of the recording of the
call. The user could record the conversation with a recorder, the mobile phone itself or
using apps recording the conversations. Instead, it uses a medium (Juasapp, which
provides the service).Such a call occurs in a domestic environment between individuals
who are not affected by data protection legislation.
If MIRACLIA, as it had done until recently and now repeats the recording, is
providing greater guarantees (the person who receives the call of joke can choose to
delete the recording, delete it subsequently, block his phone and prevent the user from
spreading the joke).
5. The measures taken and the scale of the penalty
Highlights MIRACLIA that complaints submitted to the Agency represent a very
small percentage (0.00002 %), compared to hundreds of users who have dealt with
through different channels (web, post call term and customer service); whereas it has
remedied the lack of information by completing the terms set out in Article 14 of the
GDPR, but considers it essential that it did offer the possibility to object and to delete the
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data; and that the proposed penalty would require the closure of the company, since it
represents 25 % of its turnover, which amounted to EUR 476,000 in 2018, in which
losses were incurred.
Calls for the proposed penalty to be revised downwards and, to that end,
considers that the following should be taken into account:
.That we find ourselves in a leisure environment that does not harm the person
called a joke, nor is his personal data misused.
.The only data at issue is the telephone number, which MIRACLIA does not keep
and a recording which can only be generated and distributed by the user, which the entity
cannot join as there is no file with the telephone and the recording.
.That the intention has always been to comply with the standard, ensure data
security and minimise information.
.It has never failed to respond to requests for deletion.
.Until the present proceedings, the infringement has focused exclusively on the
absence of consent, without the allegation of failure to comply with Article 14, which
appears to be excessive in view of the fact that it has been informing and remedied it.
.It has shown readiness to cooperate with the Agency at all times and has
provided the information requested.
.In the process under analysis, the person receiving the call is always chosen by
the app user, who is responsible for making good use of the app.
.That the question of the legal basis of the processing is being discussed in the
Supreme Court, which will decide whether the processing is anonymous for the entity,
whether the security guarantees have been put in place and whether it is a means used
by individuals in their private life.
MIRACLIA has provided a copy of one of the appeals lodged before the Tribunal
Supremo (Supreme Court) in 2019, which is based on the following grounds:
1. Spending a joke through an application or a means in which the user is
sovereign of the information provided is an act carried out at home or personal lev el and
is therefore excluded from the protection of data protection rules.
2. Voice is not personal data if it does not allow the holder to be identified or if
disproportionate efforts are needed to identify the data subject.
3. The legal basis for the processing of data (if this is considered to be personal
data) by an application providing a means of leisure in the personal or domestic sphere
of individuals is based on the legitimate interest.
.On 02/12/19 it was verified that using the link http: //juasapp.mobi/web/change
the country in which the app operates can be changed. These countries include both the
European Union (Austria, Belgium, Germany, etc.) and outside the European Union
(China, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, etc.).It is also verified that the
terms and conditions of use of the service are written in English, Italian, French and
German.
.On 03/12/2019, a new installation of the application was carried out, verifying
that in the process it does not offer an option to shape another country or another
language, although the terms and conditions of use of the service are written in English,
Italian, French and German in the same way as those available via the Internet.
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The acting inspection incorporates in the proceedings documents entitled ‘Terms
and conditions of use of the service’ and ‘Privacy policy’.The latter states:
‘1. INTRODUCTION
This privacy policy applies to the information we can obtain from or about you
when using the JUASAPP mobile application (the “Mobile APP” or the “Service”)”.
‘Miraclia does not collect data from the recipients of the jokes. Miraclia’s activity
is to provide a means of telecommunications to enable the owner of the telephone
downloading the app to choose a joke and to record it, with data relating to the recipient
of the call stored on the user’s own terminal without Miraclia retaining information on the
recipient’s telephone number. Miraclia provides a cloud storage service for the
customer’s audio files and at no time does it disseminate or share that information with
anyone, as it is private information of the app user.’
The inspection services also carried out a test of downloading the app into a
mobile terminal. It is checked that during the installation process the user recei ves the
same text reproduced above about the non-collection of data from the recipients of the
jokes and, among others, the following message:
‘Please read these Legal Terms and Conditions in detail and please accept if you
are over 18 years of age and accept all the terms and conditions. Otherwise, it leaves
the application and opts out of the terminal. Remember, if you record a joke and spread
it with your friends, it is because you have applied for permission from the person who
received the joke or gave it to you. You are solely responsible for this action.”
A button marked “Continue” is inserted immediately after this text.
A motion for a resolution was issued, proposing:
1. That the Director of the AEPD penalise MIRACLIA for an infringement of
Articles 13 and 14 of the GDPR, which is defined in Article 83 (5) (b) and classified as
very serious for the purposes of limitation in Article 72 (h) of the LOPDGDD, with a fine
of EUR 20,000 (twenty thousand euros).
2. That the Director of the AEPD penalise MIRACLIA for an infringement of Article
6 of the GDPR, which is defined in Article 83 (5) (a) and classified as very serious for the
purposes of limitation in Article 72 (1) (b) of the LOPDGDD, with a fine of EUR 20,000
(twenty thousand euros).
3. That the Director of the AEPD request MIRACLIA to comply, within a period to
be determined, with the rules on the protection of personal data, the processing
operations which it carries out, the information provided to its clients and the procedure
by which they must give their consent to the collection and processing of their personal
data, with the scope set out in Article XI of the motion for a decision. This should also be
implemented in all the countries of the European Economic Area in which MIRACLIA
operates through the Juasapp application.
Notified to MIRACLIA of the above-mentioned proposal for a decision, this
Agency received a written submission requesting that the measures be closed on the
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basis of the following considerations:
A. What MIRACLIA calls ‘Technical facts’:
MIRACLIA is a telecommunications company operating a service called
“Juasapp”, which is subject to regulation of “number-based interpersonal electronic
communications service”.
In that regard, it points out that the Juasapp service is in a different technical and
data-processing environment from that presented in previous actions of the Agency and
the Ordinary Justice. In fact, the scenario of the service in force on the dates of the
complaints is dependent on the version of the service that has been audited by a
professional telecommunications engineer (please provide a copy of the corresponding
report) from which the following conclusions are drawn or “Final Opinion”:
‘1. The interpersonal electronic communications service based on ‘Juasapp’
numbering has the attributes and characteristics defined in Directive (EU) 2018/1972
establishing the European Electronic Communications Code (EECC), enabling it to be
classified as a number-based interpersonal electronic communications service as
defined in Article 2 (5) and (6) thereof.
2. The regulatory framework applicable to electronic communications services
makes a clear distinction between the production of content, which entails editorial
responsibility, and the transmission of content, which does not imply any editorial
responsibility (Article 2 (4) EECC and judgments of the Court of Justice (Fourth
Chamber) of 5 June 2019 Y of 13 June 2019) of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU).
3. The user of the interpersonal electronic communications service based on
‘Juasapp’ numbering (the person initiating the transmission) unilaterally determines the
recipient of the service, for whom there are no constraints requiring that he is a user of
the Juasapp service but is a freely chosen recipient on the basis of the public numbering
resources on whose data, publicly accessible and known to the user, he does not
process any ‘Juasapp’.
4. From the start of the number-based interpersonal electronic communications
service, ‘Juasapp’ is limited to providing the physical means, of their own or of third
parties, for the transmission of the signal between who initiates the transmission and the
recipient of the signal chosen by the latter, in compliance with the quality, privacy,
security and transparency requirements laid down in that directive.
5. Juasapp does not record the conversation. The recordings are made by the
user who has contracted the Juasapp service in a private domain assigned exclusively
to that user (in the cloud by allocating a private URL) who, as part of his right to
participate in the edition of the recordings and accepting the terms of use of ‘Juasapp’,
unilaterally decides to record them for their personal use.
6.‘Juasapp’ also does not retain data of the final recipient other than those which,
as a minimum, enable him to comply with the provisions of the data retention rules and
to provide the service to the user of the data. I.e. Directive 2006/24/EC on the retention
of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of electronic
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communications services, transposed in Spain by Law 25/2007.
7.‘Juasapp’ offers the possibility for persons or entities, who make use of
networks with public numbering resources to be chosen as recipients of transmissions
by ‘Juasapp’ users, to apply for inclusion on a ‘black list’ in order to inhibit the receipt of
electronic communications via the Juasapp service.
8. In accordance with Recital 173 and Article 95 GDPR, which states that the
GDPR shall not impose additional obligations on natural or legal persons in relation to
processing in the framework of the provision of public electronic communications
services in public communications networks in areas where they are subject to specific
obligations with the same objective set out in Directive 2002/58/EC” (Directive on privacy
and electronic communications).In this regard, account should be taken of recital 34 of
Directive 2002/58/EC: ‘It is necessary, with regard to the identification of the source line,
to protect the right of the calling party to reserve the identification of the line from which
the call is made and the right of the person called upon to refuse calls from unidentified
lines.’ It is therefore necessary to respect the right of the user who initiates the
transmission (bromists) not to present his telephone number to the recipient, since, first,
user and recipient make use of public telephone resources, the right of the calling user
is to be protected by means of (bromists) the right not to present his telephone number
in order to communicate it to the recipient, since, first, user and recipient make use of
public numbering resources and the right of transmission to which the calling is made,
and the right of the calling party to communicate the telephone number to the rec ipient,
first user and recipient making use of the second line identification, and the right of
transmission to which the call is made, and the right of the calling user not to present his
telephone number to the recipient.
B. Which MIRALCIA calls “Regulatory Framework”:
(1) The considerations described in Article 95 GDPR should apply to the number -
based interpersonal communications service (“Juasapp” ) (“This Regulation shall not
impose additional processing obligations on natural or legal persons in the framework of
the provision of public electronic communications services in public communications
networks in the Union in areas where they are subject to specific obligations with the
same objective set out in Directive 2002/58/EC”).
(2) MIRACLIA does not at any time process the data for the following reasons:
a. these cases fall outside the scope of the GDPR on the basis of Recital 18 and
Article 2 (2) (c) GDPR, as they concern data processing carried out by a natural
person in the course of a purely personal or household activity.
b. the sole controller is the user of “Juasapp” and not MIRACLIA.The user carries
out the processing directly because it is the person who freely makes the necessary
edition for the act of the joke (edits the joke to be spent; enter the phone number of
the person receiving the call and press the push-button; decides whether to generate
the file with the recording of the joke and thus the URL of it, which is personal and
known only to the user).Moreover, it is always the user himself who broadcasts the
joke in his particular environment.
MIRACLIA intervenes only to provide the number-based interpersonal electronic
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communications service, which has been contracted by the user of the service.
On this basis, he proposes that the Agency approach the bromists with the same
action as against MIRACLIA.
C. During first and foremost the process of joke, the app user and controller does
not derive any economic benefit, so recital 18 GDPR and Article 2 (2) (c) above
apply.
(3) Click ‘examples’ of other companies providing number-based interpersonal
electronic communications services for which, according to MIRACLIA, the Spanish Data
Protection Agency has not carried out any investigation or inspection for similar reasons,
where the communications service provider is never responsible (user of a telephone
operator calling a known person and insults occur in communication; or calling a public
or private centre to warn of the existence of a bomb; a computer attack in which the virus
uses communication networks and storage of digital information to infect others; use of
an app for a meeting by videoconference between publicly numbered subscribers, which
allows the administrator to make a recording of the app; The ‘Burovoi’ interpersonal
electronic communications service (https: //www.burovoz.es/), which allows its users to
record telephone conversations between a user of the service and another person, who
is not a user of the ‘Burovoi’ service, but has a telephone number in the public numbering
system.The functioning of this service is exactly the same as “Juasapp” and not only is
100 % legal but its recordings have been and are fully valid when presenting them as
evidence in legal proceedings in Spain.
(4) On the subject of recordings of telephone calls made by ‘Juasapp’ users,
Judgment No 114/1984 of 29 November, delivered by the Second Chamber of the
Constitutional Court, states that ‘Who records a conversation of others, irrespective of
any other consideration, to the right recognised in Article 18.3 of the Constitution; On the
other hand, a person who recorded a conversation with another person does not, by
virtue of that fact alone, engage in conduct contrary to the aforementioned constitutional
provision.’
(5) Article 20 of the Spanish Constitution provides for and protects the rights to:
‘To the literary, artistic, scientific and technical production and creation’, all of which are
part of the right to freedom of expression enjoyed by all Spanish citizens in general and
the user of ‘Juasapp’.
(6) In its final considerations, it adds that compliance with the data retention
obligation imposed by Law 25/2007 enabled the entity to effectively and within the time
limits set by the GDPR the rights of access, rectification and deletion which have been
requested by multiple recipients of the jokes, as well as by the State Security Forces and
Corps in order to investigate possible crimes.
C. With regard to the complaints set out in the Background to this decision, it
states the following:
1. The complaint made by complainant 1 should not have been admissible for the
following reasons:
(a) The complainant refers to identity theft by a police.
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(b) The complainant did not contact MIRACLIA to request the exercise of
ARCOPOL rights.
(c) It is very likely that the complainant suffered a joke from another competing
service and therefore asks the Agency to require the telecommunications operators to
obtain from the telecommunications operators a statement of calls received on the
number of the person receiving the call.
(d) On 30/10/2018, the complainant received a letter from MIRACLIA informing
him that ‘Juasapp’ did not have in his catalogue any jokes similar to that described in the
catalogue and asked him to provide the URL of that recording for ca ncellation, if it were
outside the Juasapp service. The complainant did not provide this information, so it is
understood that the exercise of rights was sufficiently lent.
(e) We note in the file that the complainant provides a record of Whatsapp.
However, ‘Juassap’ never sends the contents of the jokes by Whatsapp, as they can
only be heard in the user’s own application. Furthermore, the files of the recordings of
the jokes that users can download onto their device have a file name which is not the
same as that provided as evidence. It can therefore be inferred that there may have been
an amending act and the evidence should be invalidated at that time.
(f) The company is seeking to examine the possibility of bringing a criminal action
against him for false complaint and damage to the company’s honour.
(g) Therefore, and given that MIRACLIA has always agreed to remedy users’
rights, it asks the Agency to close this case as it responded to the request for access to
its data and considered that, with the information available, the joke did not start from a
‘Juasapp’ user.
2. MIRACLIA also considers that the complaint lodged by complainant 2 should
also have been declared inadmissible on the following grounds:
(a) The acquainted person (s) fully knows the bromist (s) and should therefore
have brought the action against them and not against MIRACLIA, which does not
process the data of the person who receives the call of joke.
(b) It is false that the abropated person received a call at 3: 30 in the early
morning, since none of the ‘Juasapp’ jokes can be held at those local times. Moreover,
Juasapp, as a number-based interpersonal electronic communications service, never
makes calls to any recipient once the joke has occurred, as this is something that can
only be done by the user of the app.
(c) The complainant did not contact MIRACLIA requesting the exercise of
ARCOPOL rights.
(d) It is also false that once the right of access ‘Juasapp’ has been exercised it
continues to send emails. Juasapp has never committed or commits such practices.
D. As regards the facts established, MIRACLIA makes the following observations:
.Done at 1: MIRACLIA owns a number-based interpersonal electronic
communications service accessed by means of an application called ‘Juasapp’.There is
a website with the same name, ‘Juasapp’, as a commercial and user information service
that is not part of the electronic communications service provided by MIRACLIA and has
not been the subject of a complaint.
.Done at 2: Under Article 95 GDPR, interpersonal electronic communications
services based on public numbering resources are not required to identify the call
operator or platform owner or to indicate where to obtain information on the call or on the
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exercise of rights. As mentioned above, ‘Juasapp’ is an application providing access to
an interpersonal electronic communications service, the user of which reserves the right
or not to identify and personally record that call.
.Done at 4: The reference to the hosting of the jokes on a public sit e is wrong.
Audio access is provided via a token based URL as used on thousands of privately
accessible websites (e.g. the parcel tracking website of a messaging service or a
multitude of public services for the payment of fines).The URL referred to by the inspector
is automatically generated on the server, which means that, as it is not a fixed or static
URL, it can only be accessed by the user of the interpersonal electronic communications
service based on public resources whose name is ‘Juassap’.Only the sender of the joke
and the recipient of the joke have access to that URL if the sender of the joke wishes to
do so (it is their responsibility).
.Done at 5: this proven fact indicates that the link http:
//juasapp.mobi/web/change allows you to change the country where the app operates.
However, it is not known how the Agency has accessed this pre -production platform
which is a prototype of evidence that has never worked in production and therefore could
never be used by an end-user as an electronic communications system. The purpose of
that prototype was to offer the electronic communications service in multi-platform mode,
such as Skype, which can be used on an app or on a computer independently of its
Operating System.
.Done at 9: In any catalogue of MIRACLIA’s jokes no jokes appear to replace any
body or person, let alone the police. As well as copying the catalogue of MIRACLIA,
there are a multitude of other fungi services, but they are likely to have introduced some
of them as a substitute for the police, but MIRACLIA is not aware of this.
E. In response to the considerations set out in ground IV of law concerning the
definition of processing of personal or domestic data, MIRACLIA makes the following
statements:
.Personal or domestic conversation takes place through the provision of a
number-based interpersonal electronic communications service. Numbering data are
public resources that are not processed by an operator. The user of that service and
which is processed is who enters the service and chooses the recipient of the call on the
basis of those public resources. It is that user who recorded the call using tools
complementary to the basic electronic communications service. The cited references of
the CJEU do not refer to the case of such services.
Furthermore, it is the user who decides freely and freely to whom he steers the joke
within his known contacts or family or friends.
.The judgment of the Court of Justice in Case 10/07/2018, according to which ‘an
activity shall not be regarded as exclusively personal or household where its purpose is
to give an indeterminate number of persons access to personal data or where the activity
extends, even in part, to the public space and is therefore directed outside the private
sphere of the person processing the data, is not valid for Juasapp’.The purpose of the
service is to establish an electronic communication initiated by the bromist, who decides
to record it and to have access to its private recording. Sharing it in his private circle is a
decision of the bromist, who in the Tyc is told that he may infringe regulatory standards
depending on the processing of that data (his own private data).The purpose of the
service is under no circumstances to share the recording indiscriminately.
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.The proposal states that “MIRACLIA’saction is essential since without it it would
not be possible to process data as it is done in the process. MIRACLIA provides the
means of making the call, providing the means of choosing a joke, and providing the
means to record and store a joke.”In this regard, MIRACLIA states that it is logical that it
should be in this way, since it has defined Juasapp as a number -based interpersonal
electronic communications service with that functionality and should be governed in its
entirety as described by the regulatory standards in force (Directive (EU) 2018/1972
establishing the European Electronic Communications Code (EECC), as defined in
Article 2 (5) and (6) thereof.
F. The constitutional principle itself
‘This principle of “personal responsibility” has been referred to, which means that
a person can only be held responsible for his own facts, that is to say, not for one thing
or an animal.’
(source: https: //www.boe.es/publicaciones/anuarios_derecho/abrir_pdf.php?id=ANU-P-
2009-10021100252_ANUARIO_DE_DERECHO, Antonio Cuerda Riezu)
In accordance with this principle and in greater detail in the present case, we can
demonstrate that Juasapp’ as a number-based interpersonal electronic communications
service cannot bear any responsibility for the act undertaken by the user of ‘Juasapp’,
just as a gun manufacturer can never be held liable for the act committed by a person
misusing that gun.
G. Other final considerations
.The URLs that may be received by the person who receives the call of joke from
the bromists, once the call has been recorded, are NOT public URLs. The URLs
generated by the server software for the Juasapp user are private and cannot be indexed
by search engine Spiders such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.
.That the Agency take into account File No: TD/00007/2017, in which the case
concerns a person who has been acquitted by the radio 4G broadcaster and the live
broadcast and the entire audience of radio 4G and which ends up in the proceedings.
.All the points made in this letter are confirmed both in the technical audit which
is now in the process of being endorsed by COIT (Colegio Oficial de Ingenieros de
Telecomunicaciones) and in the conditions of use accepted by the user before being
able to use the platform.
Finally, he asked for a hearing in person in order to clarify before the Agency’s
investigators/inspectors the points raised and warned that, if their interests were not met,
he reserves the right to go to other higher or judicial bodies in Spain and Europe.
Withyour written observations, you provide a copy of the report on the technical
audit in question, which was carried out by a telecommunications engineer on
29/07/2020. This report is structured in four sections:
.Objectives and methodology of the work.
.Description of the Juasapp service.
.The audit findings
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.Final opinion.
According to the petitioner, it is based on face-to-face interviews, practical
‘Juasapp’ execution tests on two mobile devices and the testing of messaging, recording
and metadata tools, although it does not provide details on the development of these
tests, merely listing a number of findings.
The following is stated in the section “Audit Results”:
‘As regards the specific analysis of the Juasapp service, we found the f ollowing
facts:
(a) Only a given user registered with the Juasapp service can start the
conversation.
(b) The user of the Juasapp service is the only party to the proceedings who can
freely determine the addressee of the conversation
(c) Public numbering resources are used to determine the addressee of the
conversation.
(d) It is not required, or verified or verified by any means, that the recipient of the
conversation is a user of the Juasapp service.
(e) Once the connection between the user of Juasapp and the recipient of the
conversation has been established, the direct exchange of interpersonal information via
electronic communications networks between the two persons is permitted.
(f) ‘Juasapp’ offers the user contracting that service a set of pre-configured
templates for the editing of a voice message.
(g) The user contracting the Juasapp service is who freely chooses between them
to determine the content of the message to be transmitted.
(h) The recording is made on a personal and private domain assigned exclusively
to the user of the ‘Juasapp’ service, as a service that provides ‘Juasapp’ to the cloud
user on his own premises.
(I) The recording domain offered by ‘Juasapp’ to the user of that service is a
private and secure domain.
(j) The final decision as to whether or not to record the message in his private
domain lies exclusively with the user of the ‘Juasapp’ service.
(K) ‘Juasapp’ offers the user contracting that service an interactive metadata
toolkit to perform on possible actions on the edited message.
(L) ‘Juasapp’ offers any person or entity that is part of a plan for the use of public
numbering resources the possibility to join ‘blacklists’ so as not to receive more calls
from Juasapp users.
(m) In fact, certain numbers in the public numbering plan are by default included
in that ‘black list’ (091, 061, 112, 092, etc.).
(N) ‘Juasapp’ provides the physical means, either of its own or of a third party, for
the transmission of the signal between who initiates the transmission and the rec ipient
of the transmission chosen by him.
(o) ‘Juasapp’ does not retain data of the final recipient except those which, as a
minimum, enable him to comply with the provisions of the legislation on data retention’.
In the previous section, the ‘Description of the Juasapp service’ label describes
the information provided by MIRACLIA to the auditing engineer, which corresponds
literally to the ‘facts’ detailed as a result of the audit.
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That report includes an Annex II relating to the ‘starting points and ref erence
rules’.This Annex refers to the definition of an interpersonal electronic communication
service introduced by the European Electronic Communications Code (EECC), which is
those that pertain to the exchange of interpersonal and interactive informatio n via
electronic communications networks between a finite number of persons, in which the
recipients are identified by the persons initiating or participating in the communication,
and adds the following:
‘In the conditions of use of the JUASAPP application it is stated in Article 6 that
‘like any telecommunications service, the use of JUASAPP services for the purpose of
harming or harming nobody is illegal’.There is therefore a contractual declaration that
JUASAPP is a service subject to telecommunications regulation and therefore an implicit
acknowledgement that it is an electronic communications service in such a case.’
As PROBED to this Resolution, we consider that:
1. MIRACLIA owns the mobile application and web service called ‘Juasapp’.This
app allows users to make telephone jokes to third parties. The user selects a joke and a
‘victim’, who is contacted by MIRACLIA by telephone from his own system by means of
a hidden number (joke call), with a recording of the conversation made available to the
user of the app.
Theuse of the above mobile app and web services is regulated in the document
entitled ‘Terms and Conditions of Use of the Service’, which is stated to be reproduced
in this document for purposes of proof. The following can be highlighted from the content
of this document:
< < When using the Service, you will be bound by the Terms of Use and Privacy
Policy, expressly accepting its fulfilment and by entering into force a legally binding
contract with us... if you do not agree with these Terms of Use or Privacy Policy, we
recommend you to disinstall the application of your terminal.
3. Definition of the service
JUASAPP is an application that allows the user to send jokes consisting of an
audio file pre-recorded by telephone to the destination selected by the user. The user
may select from a list of jokes and indicate both the destination line and the time at which
he wishes the recipient to receive the joke. Once the joke has been made, the app has
the functionality of sharing and recording the audio file (hereafter “recording”). however,
it will be essential for the user to have the explicit consent of the person who received
the joke in order to be able to obtain it and subsequently make use of it.
(...)
NOTE: Since the personal data of the recipient of the call are stored solely and
exclusively at the terminal of the user of the application (customer), in the event that the
user removes the application at his terminal or deletes the data associated with it at its
terminal, the latter may cease to function in the sense that the deleted information
disappears from it.
(...)
5. Payment services
The use of the app may entail a cost...
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Theamounts purchased will expire after 6 months without the use of the
application. At that time, the user’s content may be deleted.
6. Use of the services offered
Through these Terms and Conditions of Use of the Service, the User contracts
with MIRACLIA a leisure and entertainment service that allows the User to send
telephone pins to a recipient and then reproduce, download or share the joke. With the
acceptance of these Terms and Conditions of Use of the Service, the Juasapp User
assumes the following responsibilities:
(...)
(b) Different and record sweets
The User, as owner of the recording, is fully responsible for obtaining the explicit
and unambiguous consent of the person who received the joke, for the recording and
dissemination of it.
The laws allow the recording of any telephone conversation subject to the
consent of at least one of the parties involved in the conversation. A user will not be able
to download a recording without obtaining the prior consent of the recipient of the
recording.The operation of the Service prevents the creation of grabbing if the user of
JUASAPP does not expressly accept such a precondition.
Inorder to share jokes publicly, the Service requires that the person sharing the
joke has obtained permission to do so from all the participants in the call. MIRACLIA is
not liable for the consequences of failure to obtain the conse nts necessary to share the
Grabbing, and it is obliged to compensate third parties or MIRACLIA for any claims
arising out of its actions.
(...)
8. Limitation of responsibilities
Responsibilities of MIRACLIA:
MIRACLIA acts only as an intermediary between the sender and the receiver of
the joke.
MIRACLIA never decides on the purpose, content and use of the processing of
the recording and therefore cannot be held responsible for it.
(...)
If the recipient of the joke (as data holder and exercising his right of objection or
cancellation) or the sender of the joke (as owner of the recording) requests MIRACLIA
to cancel the recording, the recording is automatically removed fromthe servers serving
MIRACLIA.
However, prior to the exercise of the right of objection or cancellation by the
recipient, the joke could be downloaded from the User’s device, the recording being
outside the reach of the MIRACLIA and, therefore, the entity is not responsible for the
use, disclosure and modification of it by the User.
(...)
9. Protection of data
We have set up a Privacy Policy to explain how we collect and use information
about you (the user)... > >.
2. The Agency’s inspection services, on 6, 9 and 12 September 2019, carried out
tests consisting of downloading the app into a mobile terminal and making use of it by
making calls for jokes. As a result of these actions, the following findings were made:
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.During the installation process the user receives, inter alia, the following
messages:
‘Please read these Legal Terms and Conditions in detail and please accept if you
are over 18 years of age and accept all the terms and conditions. Otherwise, it leaves
the application and opts out of the terminal. Remember, if you record a joke and spread
it with your friends, it is because you have applied for permission from the person who
has received the joke and has given it to you. You are solely responsible for this action.”
‘Miraclia does not collect data from the recipients of the jokes. Miraclia’s activity
is to provide a means of telecommunications to enable the owner of the telephone
downloading the app to choose a joke and to record it, with data relating to the recipient
of the call stored on the user’s own terminal without Miraclia retaining information on the
recipient’s telephone number. Miraclia provides a cloud storage service for the
customer’s audio files and at no time does it disseminate or share that information with
anyone, since it is private information of the user of the application” (this paragraph is
also included in the privacy policy).
A button marked “Continue” is inserted immediately after these texts.
.The Juasapp application consists of 3 tabs: ‘Listed’, ‘Examples’ and ‘My
bromas’.In this last tab, the jokes made by the bromist will be saved if they are not
removed.
.The telephone number of the incoming joke call appears as ‘Private number’ in
all cases.
.In the test installed version, the latest one available in the Android ‘Play Store’
application shop, the bromist, has no choice as to whether or not the joke is recorded.
the joke is always recorded, unless the recipient decides to delete it in accordance with
any of the procedures laid down for that purpose. If this is not the case, the recording
remains in the MIRACLIA systems until the bromist decides to remove it or, as a general
rule, for a period of 6 months after the use of the application, established by the entity
itself.
.At no time during the telephone conversation identifies the Juasapp application
as the call manager or the developer MIRACLIA as owner of the platform. Therefore, the
recipient of the joke does not know where to contact in order to obtain more information
about the call or to exercise his rights.
.At no time is the bromist named.
.Nor is it reported at any time, during the course of the joke, that the conversation
is being or may be recorded.
.At the end of the joke, the following phrase is heard: “A friend of his own has
spent a joke. If you do not want your friend to listen, download or spread the joke, or if
you do not want to receive more jokes, click 5 with your keyboard after the signal. Beeep’
From the end of the joke until the word occurs, a period of silence of 10 seconds
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elapses.
.The “erasing” of the record of the joke and the inability to continue to receive
jokes by pressing key 5 after hearing the signal indicated in the final phrase has been
unstable in the tests carried out. On one occasion when key 5 is pushed before the signal
and on another occasion the mechanism failed; on two other occasions, it was on ly
clicked once after the signal and was successfully removed. It was found that there is no
confirmation of erasing of the joke, simply when approximately 10 seconds after the
indicated signal to press key 5, the communication is cut off.
In cases wherethe removal worked correctly, the joke disappears from the list
of jokes made by the bromist and cannot therefore be shared, downloaded or listened
to. It has also been found that the telephone number was blocked to receive more jokes.
.There are three icons on the list of jokes made by the bromist, next to each of
the jokes not removed by the joke receiver in accordance with the procedure indicated:
one to download the audio file of the recording of the telephone conversation of the joke,
one to listen and a third to share it. In the latter case, the link to the audio file of the
recording is sent via the media chosen to share it. This is the only moment when the link
to the audio file is known to the bromist.
.In the event that the bromist leaves the finger pressed on a certain joke in the
list of jokes made, a pop-up window appears offering the possibility of removing the audio
file from MIRACLIA systems, but this action is not as intuitive as the three above, without
a specific icon.
.On the saved jokes, there is the telephone number of the destination, type of
joke, date and time of making.
.Uninstalled the app and re-installed, it can be seen that the telephone numbers
of the jokes made appear as ‘??????????’, which suggests that this data is stored locally
and not on the servers of MIRACLIA.
.Joke calls may be instantaneous or programmed by specifying the date and time
of execution. In this case, the recipient’s telephone is stored in MIRACLIA’s systems until
the call is made. In that regard, MIRACLIA has stated in its submissions that the
telephone number to which the joke is addressed is linked to the call to be made, which
disappears from its systems when the call is made.
Theacting inspector programmed a joke at his terminal for delayed execution and
the terminal was subsequently switched off. The call was made at the scheduled time,
meaning that the phone was stored in the MIRACLIA systems until the time of performing
the joke (minutes, hours, days or months).
.There are only two options for deleting the recording: the bromist follows the
erasure procedure described since the application; or to ask MIRACLIA, a question
which is difficult for the person concerned, considering that it is not apparent at any time
who handles the call or the undertaking responsible for the call. Furthermore, to do so,
the person concerned will need to know the link to the audio file and do not have this
information, unless it is provided by the user (the joke can be removed by knowing the
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url of the recording and using the mechanism provided on the web next to the request to
block the telephone line number).
3. MIRACLIA offers on its website ‘juasapp.es’ a free and immediate system to
include a telephone number in the list of blocked telephones.
The inspection carried out a test by registering in that system the telephone
number corresponding to the second SIM of the inspector’s terminal. Subsequently, an
attempt was made to make a joke to that telephone number and the application did not
allow it to be executed.
4. MIRACLIA does not have a platform on which the gumps made are published
so that any third party can access them, but the recordings of the jokes are hosted on a
public site, which makes it possible to access them via the link to the audio file, which
can be disseminated indiscriminately by the bromist user.
5. On 02/12/19 it was verified that using the link http: //juasapp.mobi/web/change
the country in which the app operates can be changed. These countries include both the
European Union (Austria, Belgium, Germany, etc.) and outside the European Union
(China, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, etc.).It is also verified that the
terms and conditions of use of the service are written in English, Italian, French and
German.
6. On 03/12/2019, the application was installed, verifying that the process does
not provide an option to shape another country or another language, although the terms
and conditions of use of the service are written in Spanish, Italian, French and German,
the same languages as are available when accessing the website on the Internet.
7. The complainant 1 has stated that on 01/09/2018 he received on his mobile
telephone line 639610479 a joke call via the ‘Juasapp’ app, in which a person wanted to
be a police officer. Denounces that the call was recorded and disseminated to third
parties without their knowledge or consent; and that the call is made from a hidden
number.
8. Complainant 2 has stated that, on 29/06/2019, she was the subject of a
telephone call for jokes made using the ‘Juasapp’ application, which was recorded and
broadcast on social media with a reference to her name without her permission (he
provides the link to the audio which is the subject of the complaint ‘http: //juasapp.mobi:
8080/...’).
On 26/08/2019, the inspection services accessed the ‘juasapp.es’ website, the
URL corresponding to the recording of the joke made to complainant 2. It is checked that
using the right-hand button different options are displayed, including reproducing and
downloading the recording.
9. The Agency’s inspection services have found that the jokes reported by
complainants 1 and 2 appear in the catalogue of broths available in ‘Juasapp’.
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Concerned Supervisory Authorities
The following supervisory authorities have been informed of this final decision:
- SA Belgium
- Berlin SA
- Cyprus SA
- SA Denmark
- SA France
- SA Greece
- SA Hungary
- SA Ireland
- SA Lower Saxony
- SA Norway
- SA Poland
- SA Saxony
- SA Slovakia
- SA Sweden
- Mecklenburg-VorpommernSA.
NORM allegedly infringed
The complaint concerns the failure of MIRACLIA to compile with the request of those
who suffer from the brown regarding the following Articles of the GDPR:
- Legality of the processing (Article 6)
- Transparency and Information (Articles 12, 13 and 14)
Final decision on action to be taken
The legal basis of the proposed Resolution is as follows:
Theseproceedings are initiated on the basis of complaints received at this
Agency against MIRACLIA, in which the persons concerned (the person who receives
the call for jokes) complain about the use of their personal data to make a joke, using
the ‘Juasapp’ application, by calling their mobile telephone lines by telephone. The
recording of the call without the knowledge of the persons concerned and the
dissemination of that recording to third parties, including without their consent, are
denounced.
The procedure is therefore aimed at an overall analysis of the Juasapp
application from the point of view of the rules on the protection of personal data and in
relation to persons who receive calls of jokes.
Any analysis of the position of the users of the application (bromists), as well as
of the information MIRACLIA provides to them and of the processing of their personal
data, is omitted.
On the basis of the above, any conclusions drawn from the present proceedings
will not lead to a ruling on the above aspects that have been discarded.
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IV
As a preliminary point, it is necessary to consider the argument put forward by
MIRACLIA in relation to its position in the personal relationship betwe en a bromist and a
person called a joke. It considers that its intervention is limited to providing a leisure
environment between private individuals, who acts as an intermediary in a relationship
between private individuals.
In accordance with this approach, MIRACLIA takes the view that the rules on the
protection of personal data are not applicable to the present case, since spending a joke
through an application or a means in which the user is sovereign of the information
provided is an act carried out at the domestic or personal level and thus excluded from
the scope of protection of that legislation in accordance with Article 2 (2) GDPR and
Article 2 (2) (a) of the LOPDGDD.Article 2 (2) GDPR reads as follows:
‘2. This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data:
(c) carried out by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household
activity’.
The Agency, on the other hand, considers that the action of the requested entity
cannot be included in this exception for three reasons:
.MIRACLIA is not a natural person: Article 2 (2) (c) GDPR, by providing for the
exception indicated, explicitly refers to the processing of personal data by a natural
person.
.Its activity is carried out in connection with a professional or comme rcial activity.
It is set up as a limited company with a view to making a profit and having a commercial
character.
.The GDPR applies in full to controllers or processors who provide the means to
process personal data related to personal or household activities (if actually).
On these issues, recital (18) GDPR states:
“This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural
person in the course of a purely personal or household activity and thus with no
connection to a professional or commercial activity. Personal or household activities
could include correspondence and the holding of addresses, or social networking and
online activity undertaken within the context of such activities. However, this Regulation
applies to controllers or processors who provide the means to process personal data
related to such personal or household activities.”
We are dealing with business activities, with a business model based on the
realisation of jokes through an application in exchange for a price .
In order to define what is to be regarded as treatment of a purely personal or
domestic nature, although the application of those provisions may be ruled out in this
case without it being necessary to go into that analysis, account should be taken of the
case-law of the Court of Justice in Lindqvist, Rynes and Witnesses of Jehová (judgment
of 10 July 2018, C-25/17).
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According to these judgments, it can be considered that the CJEU generally
understands that the exception of activities of a purely personal or domestic nature must
be interpreted strictly, only where the processing of data affects ‘incidentally’ the private
life or privacy of ‘other persons’, other than the controller processing the personal data.
The Court also states that the nature of personal or household activities is not defined
exclusively as opposed to the dissemination of the data, as MIRACLIA seems to suggest,
but that such dissemination implies that the processing of personal data relating to the
private or family life of individuals cannot be considered to be excluded from the
protective legislation, so that there may be other cases in which, even when personal or
household personal data are concerned, it cannot be regarded as falling within the
exception provided for in Article 2 (2) (c) of the GDPR.
It is important not to lose sight of the processing of personal data carried out in
the present case: it consists of a telephone call, to a telephone of a third person, whose
voice, when replying to the call, is recorded in MIRACLIA’s technical system. As can be
seen, in this case the private life or privacy of others is not ‘incidentally’ affected, but the
very purpose of that data processing is precisely the voice of the third person called. In
other words, the processing of the personal data of the third party named is not a mere
‘incidental’ inconvenience within a more general data processing, but the use of his
personal data is precisely the purpose of the processing. Consequently, such data
processing of the voice of the person receiving the call cannot in any event be regarded
as merely incidental, but as a ‘principal’ processing.
The Court of Justice of 10 July 2018, C-25/17, Jehová’s Witnesses, sets out an
interpretation of the concept of purely personal or household activitie s and reads as
follows:
42 As the Court has held, the second indent of Article 3(2) of Directive 95/46 must
be interpreted as covering only activities which form part of the private or family life of
individuals. In that regard, an activity cannot be regarded as exclusively personal or
household within the meaning of that provision where it is intended to allow an indefinite
number of persons access to personal data or where the activity extends, even in part,
to the public space and is therefore directed outside the private sphere of the person
processing the data (see, to that effect, judgments of 6 November 2003, Lindqvist,
C-101/01, EU: C: 2003: 596, paragraph 47; Of 16 December 2008, Satakunnan
Markkinapörssi and Satamedia, C-73/07, EU: C: 2008: 727, paragraph 44, and of 11
December 2014, Ryneš, C 212/13-, EU: C: 2014: 2428, paragraphs 31 and 33).
In the case of MIRACLIA, it appears that the ‘abropated’ natural persons transfer
information to MIRACLIA, since the voice of the person receiving the call is recorded in
the application provided, and also those who are to be bromists also transmit it to
MIRACLIA, because they provide MIRACLIA with the telephone numbers for the calls to
be made by MIRACLIA.This telephone is registered in the organisation’s sys tems until
the call is made, the conversation is recorded for the purpose of providing a multimedia
content service accessed via mobile devices, offering the possibility to reproduce,
download and share the audio file. This means, first of all, that this a ctivity is directed
outside the personal and private sphere of the bromist, as interpreted by the CJEU, which
in any event excludes it from the ‘exclusively personal and private’ exception.
Itfollows that ‘bromists’ natural persons would transmit persona l data to
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MIRACLIA, which registers (that is to say, ‘processes’ those data) by recording them.
However, MIRACLIA also ‘treats’ in its systems the telephone number of those third
parties, potentially (if not materially) establishing a link between a certai n telephone
number and a certain voice recorded in its systems. In other words, MIRACLIA
processes personal data to which the exception referred to above cannot in any event
apply.
In addition, although there is initially no link between MIRACLIA and the ‘victim’,
data processing is also carried out in the form of a register of those who do not wish to
receive more jokes.
MIRACLIA’s action is essential since, without its tender, it would not be possible
to process data. MIRACLIA provides the means of calling, providing the means to choose
a joke, and provides the means to record and store a joke, which means that it
determines the means of processing and the purposes, organises, encourages and
coordinates the activities of bromists through its Juasapp application, and is therefore
involved, together with the bromists, in determining the purpose and means of
processing the personal data of the person called. Moreover, MIRACLIA, ‘having regard
to its own (commercial) objectives’, influences and encourages bro mists, and must
therefore be held responsible, together with the bromists, for the processing of data
carried out by those who have been acquitted.
V
Another preliminary issue raised by MIRACLIA relates to the existence or
otherwise of personal data. He questions whether the information can be regarded as
personal data, since MIRACLIA is unable to identify the person who receives the call of
jokes in a simple manner and without disproportionate means, and points out that the
only person who can identify the person who receives the call is the user, who is
anonymous to the entity.
It adds that it is not able to identify the person who receives the call of joke or to
link him with any other data and that voice is not personal data if it does not allow the
holder to be identified or if disproportionate efforts are necessary to identify him.
The GDPR defines the concept of ‘personal data’ in Article 4.1) as: “any
information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (“the data subject”); an
identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular
by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an
online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, p hysiological, genetic,
mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person’.
According to those definitions, information on the persons to whom the jokes are
made using the ‘Juasapp’ application collected by MIRACLIA complies with the def inition
of personal data. In addition to the telephone number, MIRACLIA also records the voice
of the abropated persons through the appropriate recording of the joke, which is likely to
be broadcast, as well as other user data.
In relation to voice recording, Report 497/2007 of the Legal Office of the Agency
states that “sound recordings shall enable a person to be identified, even more so this
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recording is attached to a file and will therefore fall within the scope of the LOPD”.In the
same vein, the Audiencia Nacional (National High Court) has expressed its view.
To the latter, I would add that the judgment of the Audiencia Nacional (National
High Court) of 19/03/2014 (rec.176/2012) states that ‘the voice of a person constitutes
personal data, as is clear from the definition given therein in Article 3 (a) of the LOPD,
such as < any information concerning natural persons identified or identifiable > >, which
is not disputed’.
This is a broad concept which may include objective information, such as first
name and surname, or subjective information, such as the assessment of an examiner
in a professional examination. This has been understood by the CJEU, for example, in
the CJEU judgment of 20 December 2017, C-434/16, Peter Nowak.
That the GDPR regards voice as personal data is undeniable. Opinion 4/2007 of
20 June 2007 of the Art. 29 Working Party on the concept of personal data (WP136) also
contains examples. In example 2 on Telephone banking, it states: ‘In telephone banking
operations, where the voice of the customer instructing the bank is recorded on a tape,
the instructions recorded must be regarded as personal data’.Similarly, both this Opinion
4/2007 and Opinion 3/2012 on the evolution of biometric technologies (WP193) state
that voice can be both personal data, raw and also used with biometric techniques.
In order for that acoustic characteristic of the human person to be considered
personal data, the GDPR determines that that information must relate to an identified or
identifiable natural person and considers that person who can be identified, directly or
indirectly through that personal data, as an identifiable person.
MIRACLIA is based on a false premiss that this is not personal data because the
MIRACLIA entity itself could not identify the person whose voice is recorded (that is to
say, the ‘data subject’, the person who receives the call), since it does not store the
addressee’s number.
This argument is misguided. The data protection rules (recital 26 of the GDPR)
are based on a comprehensive protection of the fundamental right to data protection of
a natural person. therefore, as we have explained above, the exceptions must be
interpreted strictly and the concept of personal data must be interpreted broadly.
Recital 26 of the GDPR, in the part of which is now relevant, reads as follows:
“The principles of data protection should apply to all information relating to an
identified or identifiable natural person. Personal data which have undergone
pseudonymisation, which could be attributed to a natural person by the use of additional
information should be considered to be information on an identifiable natural person. In
determining whether a natural person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the
means, such as uniqueness, reasonably likely to be used by the controller or by any
other person to identify the natural person directly or indirectly”.
As can be seen, the GDPR considers that a person is identifiable when that
person can be identified either by (i) the controller or by (ii) any other person.
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As we haveseen above, the ‘bromist’ could be regarded as the controller
together with MIRACLIA, so that, in those circumstances, there is no doubt that the
bromist can identify the voice of the person who is the recipient of the call. However,
even if it were considered that the bromist is not a controller, it would be regarded as a
‘third person other than the controller’, and the GDPR considers, even in that case, that
the ‘person called a joke’ is a person identifiable by the ‘bromist’, which determines that
the data of that identifiable person’s voice must be regarded as personal data.
The data protection rules, therefore, do not restrict the concept of ‘personal data’
or ‘identifiable person’ solely to cases where the controller is able to identify, directly or
indirectly, the data subject whose data are being processed (the person who receives
the call), but extends the scope of the protection beyond that circumstance, and
considers that if that person (the person receiving the call) considers that, as a result of
the means made available to him or her by the broker, that person is not directly
responsible, he or she considers that if that person (the person who receives the call) is
directly responsible, as a result of the means made available to the broker by the data
controller, who is not a person who is directly responsible, and considers that if that
person (the person who receives the call), as a result of the means made available to
the broker by the data controller, is not directly responsible.
In the event that two joint controllers are considered to exist in respect of the
same processing, the CJEU has dealt with the fact that data protection law does not
require or imply that each of them has access to the personal data in question, so that
there may be one of those controllers who, without having access to the personal data,
will remain responsible (see paragraph 69 of the judgment of 29 July 2019, C -40/17,
Fashion ID, which in turn cites paragraph 29 of the judgment of 5 June 2018, C-210/16,
Wirtschaflesvá of 10 July 2018, paragraph 65 of the judgment of, C-25/17, Fashion ID,
which in turn cites paragraph of the judgment of, WirtschaflesBA, paragraph of the
judgment of, Case, Fashion ID.
VI
Article 5 ‘Principles relating to processing’ of the GDPR provides:
‘1. personal data shall be:
(a) processed lawfully, fairly and transparently in relation to the data subject
(‘lawfulness, loyalty and transparency’);
(b) collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further
processed in a manner incompatible with those purposes; further processing for
archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or
statistical purposes shall, in accordance with Article 89(1), not be consid ered to be
incompatible with the initial purposes (‘purpose limitation’);
(c) adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes
for which they are processed (‘data minimisation’);
(d) accurate and, if necessary, kept up to date; every reasonable step must be
taken to ensure that personal data that are inaccurate, having regard to the purposes for
which they are processed, are erased or rectified without delay (‘accuracy’);
(e) maintained in such a way as to allow the identification of data subjects for no
longer than is necessary for the purposes of the processing of personal data; personal
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data may be stored for longer periods insofar as the personal data will be processed
solely for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research
purposes or statistical purposes in accordance with Article 89(1) subject to
implementation of the appropriate technical and organisational measures required by
this Regulation in order to safeguard the rights and freedoms of the data subject (‘storage
limitation’);
(f) processed in such a way as to ensure adequate security of personal data,
including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental
loss, destruction or damage, by the application of appropriate technical or organisational
measures (‘integrity and confidentiality’).
2. The controller shall be responsible for and able to demonstrate compliance
with paragraph 1 (‘accountability’)’.
In relation to the above principles, account is taken of Recital 39 of the GDPR:
‘39. Any processing of personal data should be lawful and fair. It should be
transparent to natural persons that personal data concerning them are collected, used,
consulted or otherwise processed and to what extent the per sonal data are or will be
processed. The principle of transparency requires that any information and
communication relating to the processing of those data should be easily accessible and
easy to understand, and that clear and plain language is used. That principle concerns,
in particular, information to the data subjects on the identity of the controller and the
purposes of the processing and further information to ensure fair and transparent
processing in respect of the natural persons concerned and their right to obtain
confirmation and communication of personal data concerning them which are being
processed. Natural persons should be made aware of risks, rules, safeguards and rights
in relation to the processing of personal data and how to exercise their rights in relation
to such processing. In particular, the specific purposes for which personal data are
processed should be explicit and legitimate and determined at the time of the collection
of the personal data. The personal data should be adequate, re levant and limited to what
is necessary for the purposes for which they are processed. This requires, in particular,
ensuring that the period for which the personal data are stored is limited to a strict
minimum. Personal data should only be processed if the purpose of the processing could
not reasonably be fulfilled by other means. In order to ensure that personal data are not
stored longer than necessary, the controller should set deadlines for their erasure or
periodic review. Every reasonable step should be taken to ensure that personal data
which are inaccurate are rectified or deleted. Personal data should be processed in a
way that ensures adequate security and confidentiality of the personal data, including to
prevent unauthorised access to or use of such data and of the equipment used for the
processing.”
VII
Article 4 of the GDPR, entitled ‘Definitions’, provides:
“(2) “treatment”: any operation or set of operations which is performed on
personal data or on sets of personal data, whether or not by automated means, such as
collection, recording, organisation, structuring, storage, adaptation or alteration, retrieval,
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consultation, use, disclosure by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making
available, alignment or combination, restriction, erasure or destruction’.
According to those definitions, the use by that entity of the information (personal
data) which it collects from the acquitted person constitutes the processing of personal
data, in respect of which the controller must comply with the principles laid down in Article
5 (1) GDPR, according to which personal data shall be ‘processed in a lawful, fair and
transparent manner in relation to the data subject (lawfulness, loyalty and transparency)’;
and developed in Chapter III, Section 1, of the same Regulation (Article 12 et seq.).
Article 12 (1) of that Regulation requires the controller to take appropriate
measures to ‘provide the data subject with any information referred to in Articles 13 and
14 and any communication pursuant to Articles 15 to 22 and 34 relating to processing in
a concise, transparent, intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain
language, in particular any information addressed to a child. The information shall be
provided in writing, or by other means, including, where appropriate, by electronic
means. At the request of the data subject, the information may be provided orally
provided that the identity of the data subject is demonstrated by other means.”
Article 13 of that legislation specifies the ‘information to be provided where
personal data are obtained from the data subject’ and Article 14 of that regulation refers
to ‘information to be provided where the personal data have not been obtained from the
data subject’.
In the first case, where personal data are collected directly from the data subject,
the information shall be provided at the same time as the data collection takes place.
Article 13 GDPR details this information in the following terms:
‘1. Where personal data relating to a data subject are collected from the data
subject, the controller shall, at the time when personal data are obtained, provide the
data subject with all of the following information:
(a) the identity and contact details of the controller and, where applicable, of h is
or her representative;
(b) the contact details of the data protection officer, if any;
(c) the purposes of the processing for which the personal data are intended and
the legal basis for the processing;
(d) where the processing is based on Article 6(1)(f), the legitimate interests of the
controller or of a third party;
(e) the recipients or categories of recipients of the personal data, if any;
(f) where applicable, the intention of the controller to transfer personal data to a
third country or international organisation and the existence or absence of an adequacy
decision by the Commission, or, in the case of transfers referred to in Articles 46 or 47
or the second subparagraph of Article 49(1), reference to the appropriate or appropriate
safeguards and the means to obtain a copy thereof or to the fact that they have been
provided.
2. In addition to the information referred to in paragraph 1, the controller shall, at
the time when personal data are obtained, provide the data subject with the following
further information necessary to ensure fair and transparent processing:
(a) the period for which the personal data will be stored or, where that is not
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possible, the criteria used to determine this period;
(b) the existence of the right to request from the controller access to and
rectification or erasure of personal data concerning the data subject, or restriction of
processing, or to object to processing, as well as the right to data portability;
(c) where the processing is based on Article 6(1)(a) or Article 9(2)(a), the
existence of the right to withdraw consent at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of
processing based on consent prior to its withdrawal;
(d) the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority;
(e) whether the provision of personal data is a legal or contractual requirement,
or a necessary requirement for entering into a contract, and whether the data subject is
obliged to provide the personal data and is informed of the possible consequences of
failure to provide such data;
(f) the existence of automated decision-making, including profiling, as referred to
in Article 22 (1) and (4) and, at least in such cases, meaningful information on the logic
involved as well as the significance and expected consequences of such processing for
the data subject.
3. Where the controller plans to further process personal data for a purpose other
than that for which they were collected, it shall provide the data subject, prior to such
further processing, with information on that other purpose and any relevant additional
information as referred to in paragraph 2.
4. The provisions of paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 shall not apply where and to the extent
that the information is already available to the data subject.’
In the second case, where the personal data are not obtained from the data
subject, the information to be provided to the data subject is set out in Article 14 GDPR:
‘1. Where personal data have not been obtained from the data subject, the
controller shall provide the data subject with the following information:
(a) the identity and contact details of the controller and, where applicable, of his
or her representative;
(b) the contact details of the data protection officer, if any;
(c) the purposes of the processing for which the personal data are intended and
the legal basis for the processing;
(d) the categories of personal data concerned;
(e) the recipients or categories of recipients of the personal data, if any;
(f) where applicable, the controller’s intention to transfer personal d ata to a
recipient in a third country or international organisation and the existence or absence of
an adequacy decision by the Commission, or, in the case of transfers referred to in
Articles 46 or 47 or the second subparagraph of Article 49(1), reference to appropriate
or appropriate safeguards and the means to obtain a copy thereof or to the fact that they
have been provided.
2. In addition to the information referred to in paragraph 1, the controller shall
provide the data subject with the following information necessary to ensure fair and
transparent processing in respect of the data subject:
(a) the period for which the personal data will be stored or, where that is not
possible, the criteria used to determine this period;
(b) where the processing is based on Article 6(1)(f), the legitimate interests of the
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controller or of a third party;
(c) the existence of the right to request from the controller access to and
rectification or erasure of personal data concerning the data subject, or restriction of
processing, and to object to the processing, as well as the right to data portability;
(d) where the processing is based on Article 6(1)(a) or Article 9(2)(a), the
existence of the right to withdraw consent at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of
processing based on consent prior to its withdrawal;
(e) the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority;
(f) the source from which the personal data originate and, where applicable,
whether they come from publicly available sources;
(g) the existence of automated decision-making, including profiling, as referred to
in Article 22 (1) and (4) and, at least in such cases, meaningful information on the logic
involved as well as the significance and expected consequences of such processing for
the data subject.
3. The controller shall provide the information referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2:
(a) within a reasonable time after the personal data have been obtained, and at
the latest within one month, taking into account the specific circumstances in which the
personal data are processed;
(b) if the personal data are to be used for communication with the data subject,
at the latest at the time of the first communication to that data subject; or
(c) if it is intended to be disclosed to another recipient, at the latest at the time the
personal data are first disclosed.
4. Where the controller intends to further process the personal data for a purpose
other than that for which the personal data were obtained, the controller shall provide the
data subject prior to that further processing with information on that other purpose and
with any relevant further information as referred to in paragraph 2.
5. Paragraphs 1 to 4 shall not apply where and insofar as:
(a) the data subject already has the information;
(b) the provision of such information proves impossible or would involve a
disproportionate effort, in particular for processing for archiving purposes in the public
interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes, subject to the
conditions and safeguards referred to in Article 89(1) or to the extent that the obligation
referred to in paragraph 1 of this Article is likely to render impossible or seriously impair
the achievement of the objectives of such processing. In such cases the controller shall
take appropriate measures to protect the data subject’s rights and freedoms and
legitimate interests, including making the information publicly available;
(c) obtaining or disclosure is expressly provided for by Union or Member State
law to which the controller is subject and which provides for appropriate measures to
protect the data subject’s legitimate interests; or
(d) where personal data must remain confidential on the basis of an obligation of
professional secrecy governed by Union or Member State law, including an obligation of
secrecy of a statutory nature’.
Article 11 (1) and (2) of the LOPDGDD provides:
‘Article 11. Transparency and information to the data subject
1. Where personal data are obtained from the data subject, the controller may
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comply with the information obligation laid down in Article 13 of Regulation (EU)
2016/679 by providing the data subject with the basic information referred to in the
following paragraph and by indicating an electronic address or other mean s allowing
easy and immediate access to the remaining information.
2. The basic information referred to in the previous paragraph shall contain at
least:
(a) the identity of the controller and his representative, if any;
(b) the purpose of the processing.
(c) the possibility of exercising the rights set out in Articles 15 to 22 of Regulation
(EU) 2016/679.
If the data obtained from the data subject are to be processed for profiling, the
basic information shall also include this circumstance. In such a case , the data subject
shall be informed of his or her right to object to the adoption of automated individual
decisions which produce legal effects on him or similarly significantly affect him or her,
where this right exists in accordance with Article 22 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679.’
In relation to this principle of transparency, account is also taken of recitals 32, 39 (already
mentioned), 42, 47, 58, 60 and 61 of the GDPR.Part of the content of these recitals is
reproduced below:
(32) Consent must be given by a clear affirmative act reflecting a freely given,
specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes to consent to
the processing of personal data relating to him or her...
(42)... In order for consent to be informed, the data subject must be aware of at
least the identity of the controller and the purposes of the processing for which the
personal data are intended...
(47) The legitimate interests of a controller, including that of a controller to which
personal data may be disclosed, or of a third party, may constitute a legal basis for the
processing, provided that the interests or the rights and freedoms of the data subject are
not overridden, taking into account the reasonable expectations of data subjects based
on their relationship with the controller... In any case, the existence of a legitimate interest
would require a thorough assessment, including whether a data subject can reasonably
foresee, at the time and in the context of the collection of personal data, that th e
existence of a legitimate interest would require a thorough assessment, including
whether a data subject can reasonably foresee at the time and in the context of the
collection of personal data. In particular, the interests and fundamental rights of the data
subject could prevail over the interests of the controller when processing personal data
in circumstances where the data subject does not reasonably expect further processing...
(58) The principle of transparency requires that all information address ed to the
public or to the data subject must be concise, easily accessible, easy to understand,
using clear and plain language and, where appropriate, displayed...
(60) The principles of fair and transparent processing require that the data subject
be informed of the existence of the processing operation and its purposes. The controller
should provide the data subject with any further information necessary to ensure fair and
transparent processing taking into account the specific circumstances and context in
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which the personal data are processed. Furthermore, the data subject should be
informed of the existence of profiling and the consequences of such profiling. If personal
data are obtained from data subjects, they should also be informed of whether they are
obliged to provide them and of the consequences if they do not do so...
(61) Information on the processing of their personal data should be provided to
data subjects at the time when they are obtained from them or, if obtained from another
source, within a reasonable time, depending on the circumstances of the case...
The Constitutional Court, inter alia, in its STC 39/2016 of 3 March, citing STC
292/2000 of 30 November, has established that the right to information is part of the
essence of the right to data protection. Thus, in its FJ2 of STC 39/2016, it states:
‘The duty to provide prior information forms part of the essence of the right to data
protection, since it is an indispensable complement to the person concerned’s need for
consent. The duty to provide information on the use and destination of personal data
required by the Organic Law on the Protection of Personal Data is closely linked to the
general principle of consent for the processing of data, since if the purpose and recipients
of the data are not known, consent can hardly be given. Therefore, when assessing
whether the right to data protection has been infringed as a result of a breach of the duty
to provide information, the waiver of consent to data processing in certain cases should
be a factor to be taken into account given the close link between the duty to provide
information and the general principle of consent.
(...)
Thus, characteristic elements of the constitutional definition of the fundamental
right to the protection of personal data are ‘the rights of the data subject to consent on
the collection and use of his or her personal data and knowledge thereof. In order to give
effect to that content, recognition of the right to be informed of who possesses his
personal data and for what purpose, and the right to be able to oppose such possession
and use by requiring the relevant person to cease possession and use of the data, are
indispensable. That is to say, by requiring the holder of the file to inform him of what data
he has about his person, by accessing his appropriate records and entries, and what
they have been intended for, which also extends to potential assignees; and, where
appropriate, require you to rectify or cancel them” (STC 292/2000 of 30 November, FJ
7).’
MIRACLIA does not at any time inform the data subject, i.e. the person who
receives the call of joke, of the content of his or her rights as set out in the GDPR.This
means that the data processing which it carries out cannot under any circumstances be
regarded as lawful.
Article 12 (1) GDPR states that such information shall be provided “in writing”;
only at the request of the data subject may the information be provided orally provided
that the identity of the data subject is demonstrated by other means. In the present case,
there has been no written information, nor has the identity of the person concerned been
established by any means.
Article 13 (1) GDPR provides that ‘where personal data relating to him or her are
obtained from a data subject’ (as is the case, since the call is made to the person who
receives the call and therefore the personal data, his or her voice, comes directly from
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the person who receives the call), the controller, ‘at the time the data are collected’, shall
provide him with all the information set out below in that paragraph.
As can be seen from the facts of the case, MIRACLIA has not previously informed
the person who receives the call of jokes of any of these circumstances, in such a way
as to infringe the fundamental right to data protection of the person who receives the call
from jokes, who have not been aware, prior to the recording which MIRACLIA always
makes of their data in their systems, of the circumstances which the legislation lays down
that they must be aware of.
Theperson concerned responds to a telephone call, which is to be recorded, not
only without having been able to give his consent, but without having been informed, at
that time, in such a way that he is aware of the intended processing of his personal data
and of the circumstances required by the legislation protecting the fundamental right.
These circumstances include the one provided for in Article 13 (1) (c) of the GDPR: the
data subject must be informed at the time of obtaining his or her personal data, inter a lia,
of the legal basis for the processing, in addition to point (d), namely that where the
processing is based on Article 6 (1) (f) — legal interest — the data subject must be
informed of the legitimate interests of the controller or of a third party whic h are invoked
as a legal basis for the processing.
That lack of information as to the legal basis for the processing or, in the case of
a legitimate interest, what those legitimate interests are, is of great importance. The
GDPR seeks to enable the data subject (the person who receives the call) to be aware
at that time (at the time of collection of his or her personal data) of what legitimate
interests are hypothetically invoked by the controller to process his or her personal data
without the need for his or her consent. It is at this point that the controller must weigh
up the legitimate interests which may be invoked by the controller against the interests
or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require the protection of
his or her personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child. Such a balancing
exercise cannot be carried out at a later stage, unilaterally by the controller, without
taking into account the rights, freedoms and interests of the person who receives the call
of joke, since it is sufficient to say that he would be denied not only his right to information
but also his right to make representations, to be heard in response to the controller’s
claim to use his personal data without his consent (that is precisely the effectiveness of
the use of the legitimate interest as a legal basis for the processing, and what MIRACLIA
claims as a controller).
The CJEU judgment of 29 July 2019, C-40/17, Fashion ID, sets out the guidelines as
to who would in any event be required to seek the data subject’s consent if there are two
or more controllers. It also determines who is required to provide information to the data
subject and when this information is to be given. It follows from that judgment that it
would be for MIRACLIA to apply it to the present case.
Paragraphs 102 to 104 of the Fashion ID judgment state:
‘102 As regards the consent referred to in Articles 2 (h) and 7 (a) of Directive
95/46, it is apparent that consent must be given prior to the collection and communication
by transmission of the data subject’s data. In such circumstances, it is for the operator
of the website, rather than for the provider of the social plugin, to obtain that consent,
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since it is the fact that the visitor consults that website that triggers the processing of the
personal data. As the Advocate General noted in point 132 of his Opinion, it would not
be in line with efficient and timely protection of the data subject’s rights if the consent
were given only to the joint controller that is involved later, namely the provider of that
plugin. However, the consent that must be given to the operator relates only to the
operation or set of operations involving the processing of personal data in respect of
which the operator actually determines the purposes and means.
103 The same applies to the obligation to provide information laid down in Article
10 of Directive 95/46.
104 It is apparent from the wording of that provision that the controller or his
representative must communicate to the data subject at least the information referred to
in that provision. It follows that the controller must provide that information immediately,
that is to say, at the time when the data are collected (see, to that effect, judgments of 7
May 2009, Rijkeboer, C 553/07, EU: C: 2009: 293-, paragraph 68, and of 7 November
2013, IPI, C 473/12-, EU: C: 2013: 715, paragraph 23).’
As we know, there is no unlimited right and the right to information of the data
subject, as an essential part of the fundamental right to the protection of his or her
personal data, is not extraneous to that principle. However, as an exception, it must be
interpreted strictly, so that it is only in the cases provided for by law that there can be an
exception to the right to information.
As stated in paragraph 39 of the judgment of the Court of Justice of 7 November
2013, C-473/12, Institut professionnel des agents immobiliers (IPI) v Geoffrey Englebert
and Others, to which we will refer more extensively:
39 According to settled case-law, the protection of the fundamental right to
privacy requires that exceptions to and restrictions on the protection of personal data be
established within the limits of what is strictly necessary (judgments of 16 December
2008 in Case-73/07 Satakunnan Markkinapörssi and Satamedia ECR I-9831, paragraph
56, and judgment of 9 November 2010 in Volker und Markus Schecke and Eifert, C-92/09
and C-93/09, ECR I 11063-, paragraphs 77 and 86).
The only limitations to the right to information are to be found in Article 23 of the
GDPR and express legislative measures are needed to agree on them, while respecting
the essence of the rights and freedoms, and provided that the specific circumstances
listed in that provision are met.
While referring to consent, MIRACLIA has pointed out that it is unable to comply
with some regulatory provisions because the very fact of spending a joke or the surprise
effect would be undermined. However, nothing has been put forward with regard to the
limitations referred to, nor does they appear to be applicable in the present case.
MIRACLIA does not mention any legislative measure that would lead to the possibility of
derogating, in the case of the Juasapp application, from the fundamental right to the
protection of the personal data of the data subject, the person called a joke, and therefore
any subsequent analysis would be meaningless. In addition, the possibility to derogate
by legislative measures from the fundamental rights of individuals is of such importance
as state security, defence, public security, prevention, investigation, detection or
prosecution of criminal offences etc. Therefore, such a possibility of exempting the data
subject’s right to information does not negate the possibility of spending jokes through
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an online application, nor from a commercial interest, so that there can be no commercial
interest justifying the right of the data subject to be informed in Article 13.
Therefore, MIRACLIA’s action is not excluded from the obligation to provide data
subjects with the right to information, with the content laid down in Article 13 GDPR, at
the time when the personal data are obtained from the data subject. Where personal
data are obtained from the data subject under no circumstances can that information be
provided later, let alone never be the case, as is the case here. In short, the data subjects
must in any event be informed so that the processing can be considered lawful, which
has certainly not been the case.
The same applies to compliance with Article 14 GDPR, which governs the
information to be provided to the data subject when the data are not collected directly
from the data subject, as is the case in relation to the mobile telephone number of the
person receiving the call, which is provided to MIRACLIA by a third party, the bromist.
In general, MIRACLIA does not provide MIRACLIA to the data subject/data subject
(a person called a joke) in the documents ‘Terms and Conditions of Use of the Service’
and ‘Privacy Policy’, apart from indicating that ‘Miraclia does not collect data from the
recipients of the jokes’, which, as we have seen, is not true.
The only information addressed to the person receiving the funeral call results from
the expression reproduced at the end of the joke call, with the following message:
“A friend of his own has spent a joke. If you do not want your friend to listen,
download or spread the joke, or if you do not want to receive more jokes, click 5 with
your keyboard after the signal. Beeep’.
As can be seen, that term does not specify that the joke has been recorded and that,
by the indicated action, it is removed from the institution’s systems. Otherwise, the detail
on none of the aspects set out in Articles 13 and 14 GDPR is included.
Moreover, at no time during the telephone conversation identifies the Juasapp
application as the call manager or the developer MIRACLIA as owner of the platform, so
that the receiver of the joke does not know where to contact to obtain more information
about the call or to exercise its rights; at no time is the bromist named; nor is it reported
at any time, during the course of the joke, that the conversation is being or may be
recorded.
The facts set out above therefore constitute a breach of the principle of transparency laid
down in Articles 13 and 14 of the GDPR, which gives rise to the application of the
corrective powers conferred on the Spanish Data Protection Agency by Article 58 of that
Regulation.
Finally, it should be noted that MIRACLIA has argued that, in the course of these
proceedings, which was aware of the complaint made for the first time in relation to the
information defects, it immediately remedied it by supplementing the information
provided at the end of the conversation of the joke as follows:
That someone has spent a joke to pass a good story.
The Juasapp application owned by MIRACLIA TELECOMUNICACIONES, S.L.
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— To object to such a joke reaching the bromist and to remove it, you can click on key
5.
— You have more information by clicking on key 1.
Clicking on key 1 provides the detailed explanation, also included on the website.
Thus, of the information which it did not provide to the data subject, it has now included:
The identity of MIRACLIA
— the contact details of the Data Protection Officer
— The retention period
— The basis for locus standi
— The exercise of the full rights guaranteed by opposition and deletion rights (and also
access rights when requested) are now formally specified.
It does not, however, provide any evidence to that effect; not even the text or recording
of the word inserted at the end of the conversation, so that the alleged information given
can be properly assessed. Nor does MIRICLIA state anything about the precautions
taken to ensure that the person concerned has actually accessed the information or the
measures to be applied in cases where communication is interrupted before the word is
reproduced.
VIII
On the other hand, Articles 6 and 7 GDPR refer, respectively, to ‘Lawfulness of
processing’ and ‘Conditions for consent’:
Article 6 GDPR.
‘1. Processing shall be lawful only if at least one of the following conditions is met:
(a) the data subject gave his or her consent to the processing of his or her
personal data for one or more specific purposes;
(b) processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data
subject is a party or for the implementation at the data subject’s request of pre -
contractual measures;
(c) processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation applicable to
the controller;
(d) processing is necessary to protect the vital interests of the data subject or of
another natural person;
(e) processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public
interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;
(f) processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued
by the controller or by a third party, provided that such interests are not overridden by
the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require the
protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child.
Point (f) of the first subparagraph shall not apply to processing carried out by
public authorities in the performance of their tasks.
2. Member States may maintain or introduce more specific provisions to adapt
the application of the rules of this Regulation with regard to processing for compliance
with points (c) and (e) of paragraph 1 by determining more precisely specific
requirements for the processing and other measures to ensure lawful and fair processing
including for other specific processing situations as provided for in Chapter IX.
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3. The basis for the processing referred to in point (c) and (e) of paragraph 1 shall
be laid down by:
(a) Union law; or
(b) the law of the Member States applicable to the controller.
Thepurpose of the processing shall be determined in that legal basis or, as regards
the processing referred to in point (e) of paragraph 1, shall be necessary for the
performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official
authority vested in the controller. That legal basis may contain specific provisions to
adapt the application of rules of this Regulation, inter alia: the general conditions
governing the lawfulness of processing by the contr oller; the types of data being
processed; the data subjects concerned; the entities to which personal data may be
disclosed and the purposes of such communication; the purpose limitation; and
processing operations and processing procedures, including measu res to ensure lawful
and fair processing such as those for other specific processing situations as provided for
in Chapter IX.The Union or the Member State law shall meet an objective of public
interest and be proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued.
4. Where the processing for a purpose other than that for which the personal data
have been collected is not based on the data subject’s consent or on a Union or Member
State law which constitutes a necessary and proportionate measure in a democratic
society to safeguard the objectives referred to in Article 23(1), the controller shall, in
order to ascertain whether processing for another purpose is compatible with the purpose
for which the personal data are initially collected, take into account, inter alia:
(a) any relationship between the purposes for which the personal data were
collected and the purposes of the intended further processing;
(b) the context in which the personal data were collected, in particular as regards
the relationship between data subjects and the controller;
(c) the nature of the personal data, in particular where special categories of
personal data are processed in accordance with Article 9 or personal data relating to
criminal convictions and offences in accordance with Article 10;
(d) the possible consequences for the data subjects of the intended further
processing;
(e) the existence of appropriate safeguards, which may include encryption or
pseudonymisation’.
Article 7GDPR.
‘1. Where processing is based on consent, the controller shall be able to
demonstrate that the data subject has consented to processing of his or her personal
data.
2. If the data subject’s consent is given in the context of a written declaration
which also concerns other matters, the request for consent sh all be presented in a
manner which is clearly distinguishable from the other matters, in an intelligible and
easily accessible form, using clear and plain language. Any part of such a declaration
which constitutes an infringement of this Regulation shall not be binding.
3. The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time.
The withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent
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before its withdrawal. Prior to giving consent, the data subject shall be informed thereof.
It shall be as easy to withdraw consent as to give it.
4. In assessing whether consent has been freely given, the utmost account shall
be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of
a service, is subject to consent to the processing of personal data which are not
necessary for the performance of that contract.’
Account is taken of recitals (32), (39), (40) to (44) and (47) of the GDPR in relation
to the above Articles 6 and 7.
Account should also be taken of the provisions of Article 6 of the LOPDGDD :
‘Article 6. Processing based on the consent of the data subject
1. In accordance with Article 4 (11) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679, the data subject’s
consent means any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of his or
her wishes by which the data subject agrees, either by a statement or by a clear
affirmative action, to the processing of personal data relating to him or her.
2. Where it is intended to base the processing of the data on the consent of the data
subject for a number of purposes, it must be stated specifically and unequivocally that
such consent is given for all of them.
3. Performance of the contract shall not be subject to the data subject’s consen t to the
processing of personal data for purposes other than those relating to the maintenance,
development or control of the contractual relationship.’
According to the above, data processing requires the existence of a lawful legal
basis, such as the consent of the data subject validly given, where there is no other legal
basis referred to in Article 6 (1) GDPR or the processing pursues a purpose compatible
with that for which the data were collected .
Article 4 GDPR defines ‘consent’ in the following terms:
“Article 4 Definitions
For the purposes of this Regulation the following definitions shall apply:
11.‘the data subject’s consent’any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous
indication of the data subject’s wishes by which the data subject, e ither by a statement
or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data
relating to him or her.’
Consent is understood as a clear affirmative act reflecting a freely given, specific,
informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes to consent to the
processing of personal data concerning him or her, provided with sufficient safeguards
to establish that the data subject is aware of and to what extent consent is given. And
should be given for all processing activities carried out for the same purposes or
purposes, so that, where the processing has several purposes, consent should be given
to all of them in a specific and unambiguous manner, without making the performance of
the contract conditional upon the data subject’s consent to the processing of his or her
personal data for purposes which are not related to the maintenance, development or
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control of the contractual relationship. In that regard, the lawfulness of the processing
requires that the data subject be informed of the purposes for which the data are intended
(informed consent).
Consent must be freely given. It is understood that consent is not freely given
where the data subject has no real or free choice or cannot refuse or withdraw his or her
consent without prejudice; or where it is not allowed to authorise separately the different
processing operations of personal data despite being appropriate in the specific case, or
where the performance of a contract or service is dependent on consent , even if the
consent is not necessary for such fulfilment. This is the case where consent is included
as a non-negotiable part of the general terms and conditions or when there is an
obligation to agree to the use of personal data additional to those strictly necessary.
Without these conditions, giving consent would not give the data subject real
control over his or her personal data and their destination, and this would render the
processing activity unlawful.
The Article 29 WorkingParty discussed these issues in its “Guidelines on consent under
Regulation 2016/679”, revised and approved on 10/04/2018; it has been updated by the
European Data Protection Board on 04/05/2020 through the document “Guidelines
05/2020 on consent under Regulation 2016/679”.From what is stated in this document,
it is now important to highlight certain aspects relating to the validity of consent, in
particular concerning the ‘specific’, ‘informed’ and ‘unambiguous’ elements:
< < 3.2. Specific
Article 6(1)(a) confirms that the consent of the data subject must be given in relation to
“one or more specific” purposes and that a data subject has a choice in relation to each
of them. The requirement that consent must be ‘specific’ aims to ensure a degree of user
control and transparency for the data subject. This requirement has not been changed
by the GDPR and remains closely linked to the requirement of ‘informed’ consent. At the
same time it must be interpreted in line with the requirement for ‘granularity’ to obtain
‘free’ consent. In sum, to comply with the element of ‘specific’ the controller must apply:
(I) the specification of the purpose as a guarantee against misuse;
(II) dissociation in requests for consent; and
(III) a clear separation between information related to obt aining consent for data
processing activities and information on other matters.
Ad. (i): Pursuant to Article 5(1)(b) GDPR, obtaining valid consent is always preceded by
the determination of a specific, explicit and legitimate purpose for the intended
processing activity. The need for specific consent in combination with the notion of
purpose limitation in Article 5(1)(b) functions as a safeguard against the gradual widening
or blurring of purposes for which data is processed, after a data subject has agree d to
the initial collection of the data. This phenomenon, also known as function creep, is a
risk for data subjects, as it may result in unanticipated use of personal data by the
controller or by third parties and in loss of data subject control.
Where the controller relies on Article 6(1)(a), data subjects shall always give their
consent for a specific purpose for the processing of the data. In line with the concept of
purpose limitation, Article 5(1)(b) and recital 32, consent may cover different operations,
provided that such operations have the same purpose. It goes without saying that
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specific consent can only be obtained when data subjects are specifically informed about
the intended purposes of data use concerning them.
Notwithstanding the provisions on compatibility of purposes, consent must be specific to
the purpose. Data subjects will give their consent with the understanding that they are in
control and their data will only be processed for those specified purposes. If a controller
processes data on the basis of consent and, in addition, wishes to process such data for
another purpose, he or she must obtain consent for that other purpose, unless there is
another legal basis that better reflects the situation...
(II): consent mechanisms must not only be granular to meet the requirement of ‘free’, but
also to meet the element of ‘specific’.This means, a controller that seeks consent for
various different purposes should provide a separate opt-in for each purpose, to allow
users to give specific consent for specific purposes. ad.
(III): lastly, controllers should provide specific information with each separate consent
request about the data that are processed for each purpose, in order to make data
subjects aware of the impact of the different choices they have. Thus, data subjects are
enabled to give specific consent. This issue overlaps with the requirement for controllers
to provide clear information, as explained above in section 3.3 > >.
< < 3.3. Informed
TheGDPR reinforces the requirement that consent must be informed. Based on Article 5
of the GDPR, the requirement for transparency is one of the fundamental principles,
closely related to the principles of fairness and lawfulness. Providing information to data
subjects prior to obtaining their consent is essential in order to enable them to make
informed decisions, understand what they are agreeing to, and for example exercise their
right to withdraw their consent. If the controller does not provide accessible information,
user control becomes illusory and consent will be an invalid basis for processing.
The consequence of not complying with the requirements for informed consent is that
consent will be invalid and the controller may be in breach of Article 6 of the GDPR.
3.3.1. Minimum content requirements for consent to be ‘informed’
For consent to be informed, it is necessary to inform the data subject of certain elements
that are crucial to make a choice. Therefore, WP29 is of the opinion that at least the
following information is required for obtaining valid consent:
(I) the identity of the controller;
(II) the purpose of each processing operation for which consent is requested;
(III) what (type of) data will be collected and used,
(IV) the existence of the right to withdraw consent;
(v) information on the use of data for automated decision-making in accordance with
Article 22(2)(c), where relevant; and
(VI) information on the potential risks of data transfer due to the absence of an adequacy
decision and adequate safeguards as described in Article 46 > >.
In the present case, MIRACLIA claims in its submissions that consent cannot be the
legal basis for spending a joke, thus taking the view that the processing of the personal
data of the persons called by them is based on the legitimate interest of Article 6 (1) (f)
GDPR.
However, that is not the case with the information contained in the document entitled
‘Terms and Conditions of Use of the Service’ (Second Proposed Event), in which it is
stated on three occasions that the user must have the explicit and unequivocal consent
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of the person who has received the joke so that the recording can be made and the audio
file can subsequently be shared, as a requirement for the operation of the service (‘The
functioning of the service avoids the creation of a prior registration).In that document,
MIRACLIA expressly states that ‘it is not liable for the consequences of failure to obtain
the consents necessary to share the recording’.
In other words, MIRACLIA bases the processing of personal data dir ectly on the consent
of the ‘person called a joke’, who must be collected by the ‘bromist’ himself.
MIRACLIA is aware, then, that that legal basis for the processing is purely formal,
fictitious. If he considers that a joke can never be based on the conse nt of the person
who receives the joke call, he does not understand what is stated in his document,
knowing that the bromist will never seek the consent of the person receiving the call.
Moreover, the processing of personal data carried out by the data co ntroller MIRACLIA
cannot under any circumstances be regarded as ‘lawful’ since the data subject is not
provided with the information to which he or she is entitled under the rules on the
protection of personal data, as concluded in the earlier legal basis.
Nor can it be regarded as lawful where, in the absence of such information, the data
subject is deprived of his right to know the legal basis for the processing alleged by the
controller, and in particular, by referring to the legitimate interest, he is deprived of his
right to know what those legitimate interests invoked by the controller or a third party
would justify the processing without taking his consent into account.
Similarly, the data subject is deprived of his right to rely on the grounds on which that
legitimate interest relied on by the controller could be counterbalanced by the rights or
interests of the data subject. If the data subject had not been given an opportunity to rely
on them against the controller, any balancing carried out by th e controller without taking
into account the circumstances which could be invoked by the data subject who was not
allowed to do so would be vitiated by an act contrary to a mandatory rule.
If the rule requires the subject to be informed of his or her righ ts, and it is not done, the
consequence must be the nullity of subsequent acts (the same balancing exercise would
be vitiated by nullity of the right and the same processing of personal data carried out
against a weighting which is null and void).
Moreover, there is no legal measure that derogates from that obligation to provide the
information in question by the person responsible, as explained above.
Therefore, the legitimate interest referred to in Article 6 (1) (f) GDPR cannot be regarded
as applicable as the legal basis for the processing of personal data.
However, although we consider that the legitimate interest is not applicable, it is
necessary to analyse hypothetically the terms in which the balancing provided for in that
article between the legitimate interest of the data controller and the protection of the data
subject’s personal data should be carried out, that is to say, how that legitimate interest,
if applicable, is to be carried out.
However, if this were the case, the CJEU, already in its judgment of 4 May 2017,
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C-13/16, Rigas Satskime, paragraphs 28 to 34, determined the conditions under which
processing may be lawful on the basis of legitimate interests. The judgment of the Court
of Justice of 29 July 2019 in Case C-40/17 Fashion ID, echoing the aforementioned
judgment, sets out these requirements.
28 In that regard, Article 7(f) of Directive 95/46 — (now Article 6 (1) (f) GDPR) —
lays down three cumulative conditions for the processing of personal data to be
lawful:first, that the controller or the third party or third parties to whom the data are
disclosed pursue a legitimate interest; Second, that the processing is necessary for the
purposes of that legitimate interest and, third, that the fundamental rights and freedoms
of the data subject are not overridden by the data protection.
As regards the first of the conditions, namely that the controller or third parties
pursue a legitimate interest, we are faced with a commercial interest, which could be
regarded as legitimate in itself, namely to earn money by selling money to third parties.
However, those benefits are obtained at the expense of affecting the rights and legitimate
interests to the protection of their personal data of the data subjects (the person called
upon to do so), and that interest must therefore be weighed against that of individuals.
As far as the second of the conditions is concerned, however, we consider that
the processing of personal data carried out by the appellant is not necessary or strictly
necessary for the fulfilment of his legitimate interest (paragraph 30 of the judgment of 4
May 2017, Rigas Satskime, C-13/16, states: ‘As regards the requirement that data
processing be necessary, it should be recalled that exceptions and restrictions to the
principle of the protection of personal data must be established within the limits of what
is strictly necessary’).
This principle that processing must be strictly necessary for the purposes of
legitimate interests must be interpreted in accordance with Article 5 (1 ) (c) GDPR, which
refers to the principle of data minimisation, stating that personal data shall be “adequate,
relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are
processed”.
Apart from, as we have already mentioned, the fact that the data subject/person
receiving the call does not know for what purposes or on what legal basis his data were
collected, it is understood that the recording of the voice of the data subjects in the
MIRACLIA systems, which is carried out in any event and in all circumstances, and also,
as has been shown in the administrative file, that the telephone numbers of the data
subjects are stored in these systems until the call is made, amounts to processing. If the
legitimate interest pursued is charging for a person, the bromist, to be able to spend a
joke, it does not seem necessary, as an intrinsic requirement of such processing, (i) to
keep the personal data (telephone and voice).Nor can it be considered legitimate, and
we therefore consider that it would be excessive treatment, that the bromist may (ii)
download the voice of the person who receives the call of joke in order to be able to go
to the recording as many times as he wishes and be able to disseminate it without
restriction, so that (iii) security measures would also be lacking to prevent such further
processing by the bromist. If the intention of MIRACLIA, with a purely commercial
interest, is to charge for spending a joke, that processing could be done without the need
to record the voice or telephone number, and without having to give the possibility,
omnimod and unlimited, to the bromier to download from his terminal the voice of the
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person receiving the call, so that it can subsequently be broadcast without limitation. The
second condition relating to non-excessive or necessary use would therefore not exist.
Thirdly, as regards balancing or balancing, i.e. that the fundamental rights and
freedoms of the data subject in data protection do not prevail, the CJEU has taken the
view (Rigas Satskime) that it depends on the circumstances of the individual case in
question.
In relation to this balancing exercise, the Working Party on Article 29 of Directive
95/46 issued Opinion 06/2014 on the concept of legitimate interests of the controller. In
its opinion, the Working Party states that:
“...such an examination requires a full consideration of a number of factors in
order to ensure that the interests and fundamental rights of those concerned are duly
taken into account. At the same time, it is a scalable test, which can vary from simple to
complex, and does not need to be unduly burdensome.
Thefactors to be considered when carrying out such a balancing test shall include:
— the nature and source of the legitimate interest, and whether the processing
of data is necessary for the exercise of a fundamental right, is otherwise in the public
interest or benefits from the recognition of the community concerned;
— the impact on the data subject and his reasonable expectations as to what will
happen to his or her data, as well as the nature of the data and the way in which they
are processed;
— additional safeguards that could limit an undue impact on the data subject,
such as data minimisation, privacy technologies, increased transparency, the general
and unconditional right to opt-out and data portability.
(a)As regards the nature and source of the legitimate interest alleged, this is an
interest of a commercial nature, as has already been shown. The TS, in its judgment in
STS 1921/2017 of 5 May 2017, ECR 407/2016, has already pointed out that the interest
of gas traders cannot prevail over the interests of consumers holding electricity supply
contracts, since the latter have a fundamental right against a purely commercial interest,
with the result that the person, the consumer in this case, has the legal power to impose
on third parties the duty to refrain from interfering in their immediate sphere and prohibit
them from making use of the and known judgments (citation 73/1982, citation 89/1987).
(b)It should be added, following the list of recommended balancing requirements,
that the processing of data which the appellant seeks to carry out is by no means
necessary for the exercise of a fundamental right and must therefore fall in the light of
the need for data subjects to protect their fundamental right.
(c)Nor can the processing of personal data proposed by MIRACLIA be
considered to be in the public interest or to benefit from the recognition of the community
concerned.
(d)As regards the reasonable expectations of the data subject as to the use of his
or her personal data and the implications for him, it is sufficient to mention that, with the
processing of personal data which the appellant intends to carry out, the data subject
loses any power of disposal over the data, since the data are recorded by a system,
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before being able to give consent or even being informed, so that the broadest user
would not be able to make use of the personal data of the person receiving the call, his
or her voice, downloading it into his/her own terminal and further disseminating it, and
thus the user would not be able to make use of the personal data of the person receiving
the call, his or her voice, downloading it into his/her own terminal and further
disseminating him/her.
(e)As regards the nature of the data, we consider that voice is particularly
sensitive. This is because we all know that the voice uniquely identifies a subject from a
wider or smaller community. But for the sake of completeness, voice can also be
considered as sensitive data in another sense, and is that the GDPR allows voice to be
considered a biometric data, provided that techniques aimed at enabling a natural person
to be uniquely identified (Article 9.1 GDPR) are applied to it or can be appl ied to it. It
does not appear that the data processing which the controller intends to carry out with
the Juasapp application is intended to apply to the voice processing which makes it a
biometric data, but even if that is not the purpose of the data processing carried out by
the controller, there is no doubt that voice can constitute the raw material, the raw data,
from which a technique could be applied to make that personal data, the voice, a
biometric data. As the TS has had occasion to consider in the above-mentioned STS
judgment 1921/2017 of 5 May 2017, ECR 407/2016, the criterion of ‘risk’ is a criterion to
be taken into account when personal data, together with others, and in breach of the
principle of information or access, may lead to the identification of the data subject.
(f)As regards the last of the above-mentioned weighting criteria, namely the
additional safeguards that could limit an undue impact on the data subject, such as data
minimisation, privacy technologies, increased transparency, we consider that it is
absolutely necessary to increase transparency in terms of providing potential callers, in
advance of the registration of their voice or telephone, with all the circumstances referred
to in Article 13 GDPR.In addition, recording the voice of the person who receives the call
of jokes in the appellant’s systems is considered excessive within the meaning of Article
5.1 (c) GDPR.
In short, and in order to put an end to this point, it does not follow from the
processing of personal data carried out by MIRACLIA that, beyond its own commercial
interest, there are no circumstances justifying the recording of the voice of the persons
called by jokes using the legitimate interest of Article 7 (f) of the Directive as the legal
basis for processing. The processing of personal data carried out by MIRACLIA is not
necessary for the purposes of the protection of a legitimate interest, nor does the
legitimate interest of the appellant outweigh the fundamental rights and freedoms of the
data subject in the protection of his or her personal data.
Consequently, the processing of personal data carried out by MIRACLIA cannot
be considered to be covered by the legitimate interest provided for in Article 6 (1) (f)
GDPR.Nor does the data subject give his consent to such data processing, which,
moreover, is unlawful because the data subject’s right to information as provided for in
the legislation on the protection of personal data has been completely disregarded.
In accordance with the above, the above facts constitute a violation of Article 6
GDPR, which results in the application of the corrective powers conferred on the Spanish
Data Protection Agency by Article 58 GDPR.
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IX
In its observations on the motion for a decision, MIRACLIA points out that
the arguments contained in the previous legal grounds are not valid for Juasapp, which
is in a different technical and data-processing context from that presented in previous
actions of the Agency and ordinary justice. In the present case, according to MIRACLIA,
‘Juasapp’ complies with the definition of number-based interpersonal electronic
communications services as defined in Article 2 (5) and (6) of Directive (EU) 2018/1972
establishing the European Electronic Communications Code (recast).
On the basis of this consideration, MIRACLIA understands that it is only
by providing the necessary means to provide the service contracted by the user, which
is the sole controller of the data of the person receiving the call; whereas the conversation
which takes place in connection with the provision of the service is personal or
household, in so far as the purpose of the service is to establish a communication
initiated by the bromist, with MIRACLIA merely providing the means for transmission; it
does not process the data of the recipient of the so-called ‘joke’ beyond compliance with
the retention obligations laid down in Law 25/2007 on the retention of data relating to
electronic communications and public communications networks.
For the same reason, MIRACLIA considers that it is not obliged to provide the
information referred to in the GDPR, as the provisions of Recital 173 and Article 95 of
the GDPR apply in conjunction with Directive 2002/58/EC on privacy and electronic
communications. According to that Article, the GDPR does not impose additional
obligations on natural or legal persons in relation to processing in the framework of the
provision of public electronic communications services in public communications
networks in the Union in areas where they are subject to specific obligations with the
same objective set out in Directive 2002/58/EC, and, according to that Directive,
interpersonal electronic communications services based on public numbering resources
may not be required to identify the call operator and the platf orm owner or to indicate
where to obtain caller rights. The right of the user of the service not to identify himself or
herself to record the call must also be respected.
These arguments must be rejected, since there is not yet any provision in national
law transposing Directive (EU) 2018/1972, the deadline for transposition of which has
not yet expired. In those circumstances, it cannot be said that its activity by means of the
Juasapp application falls within a category of electronic communications services which,
at present, does not exist in our legal system.
Furthermore, Article 95 GDPR, which prohibits the imposition of ‘additional
obligations on natural or legal persons in relation to processing in the context of the
provision of public electronic communications services in public communications
networks in the Union in areas where they are subject to specific obligations with the
same objective set out in Directive 2002/58/EC’, is not applicable to the present case,
which is not among the Directives that will be repealed by Directive (EU) 2018/1972 with
effect from 21/12/2020. This act does not refer to Directive 2002/58/EC and does not
involve the imposition of specific obligations with the same objective pursued by this
Directive.
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In any event, it should be added that MIRACLIA bases these claims on the
outcome of the audit carried out on the Juasapp application by a telecommunications
engineer in July 2020, well after the period analysed by the Inspectorate of this Agency.
Although the responsible entity states that the version of the audited application
corresponds to the version in force at the time when the complaints were made, there is
no evidence to support this. In addition, that argument, if any, was raised in its
submissions to the opening of the procedure and represents a different approach to the
position which MIRACLIA has maintained during the previous stages, in which it showed
its readiness to remedy some of the shortcomings identified and defended the legitimate
interest of the entity in the processing of data which it carries out.
Moreover, it is based on assumptions and has established facts which cannot be
accepted, mainly those relating to the existence of a conversation between a user of
‘Juasapp’, who initiates it, and a third party. It is stated that “the person initiating the
conversation should be the user contracting the Juasapp service” and that “once the
connection between the Juasapp user and the recipient of the conversation has been
established, the direct exchange of interpersonal information through electronic
communications networks between the two is allowed”.However, it is common ground
that the user of the application merely a call, in which he does not participate, which is
made from MIRACLIA systems for the purpose of reproducing to the addressee a word
(that corresponding to the joke selected by the user), with the result that there is no ‘direct
exchange of interpersonal information’.In the event of a call between the user and the
recipient of the joke, that conversation would never take place with the intermediation of
‘Juasapp’.
Similarly, it cannot be accepted that the user of ‘Juasapp’ decides to record the
content of the message which he publishes himself. The ‘joke’ call remains in any case
in MIRACLIA’s systems, without it being necessary to involve the Juasapp user, who
merely uses the means provided by the entity itself to access the audio file generated by
the system, without the user taking any action to edit its content.
On this point, the approach set out in the audit report provided by MIRACLIA,
according to which the qualification as an electronic communications service included in
the Conditions of Use of the Application implies an implicit recognition of the nature of
the service (Annex II to the audit report states verbatim as follows: ‘In the conditions of
use of the JUASAPP application it is stated in Article 6 that ‘like any telecommunications
service, the use of JUASAPP services for the purpose of harming or harming nobody is
illegal’.There is therefore a contractual declaration that JUASAPP is a service subject to
telecommunications regulation and thus an implicit acknowledgement that it is an
electronic communications service in such a case”).
Itis clear that the position held by MIRACLIA as regards the functioning of the
Juasapp application cannot be determined by an agreement between individuals or a
contractual declaration, but by the legal determinations that are applicable.
Itmay even be said that those arguments must be rejected even if we consider
the provisions of the European Electronic Communications Code, which defines
interpersonal communications services to include the conveyance of signals and other
types of services enabling communication. It distinguishes “three types of ser vices which
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may partially overlap, namely: Internet access services as defined in point (2) of Article
2 of Regulation (EU) 2015/2120 of the European Parliament and of the Council (1);
interpersonal communications services as defined in this Directive and services
consisting wholly or mainly in the conveyance of signals” (Recital 15 of Directive (EU)
2018/1972 establishing the European Electronic Communications Code).
According to Article 2, ‘Definitions’, for the purposes of that directive:
< < The following definitions shall apply:
(4) ‘electronic communications service’ means: services normally provided for
remuneration through electronic communications networks, which include, with the
exception of services providing or exercising editorial contr ol over content transmitted
using electronic communications networks and services, the following types of services:
‘internet access service’ as defined in point (2) of the second paragraph of Article
2 of Regulation (EU) 2015/2120;
interpersonal communications service; and
services consisting wholly or mainly in the conveyance of signals such as
transmission services used for the provision of machine-to-machine services and for
broadcasting;
(5) ‘interpersonal communications service’ means: generally provided in return
for a direct, interpersonal and interactive exchange of information via electronic
communications networks between a finite number of persons, where the initiator of or
participant in the communication determines the recipient (s) and doe s not include
services that enable interpersonal and interactive communication as a mere secondary
possibility which is intrinsically linked to another service;
(6) ‘number-based interpersonal communications service’ means: an
interpersonal communications service which either connects or allows communications
with assigned public numbering resources, i.e. a number or numbers in national or
international numbering plans, or allows communication with a number or numbers in
national or international numbering plans; > >.
With regard to these definitions, account should be taken of recitals 17 and 18 of that
directive:
(17) Interpersonal communications services are services which enable
interpersonal and interactive exchange of information and include service s such as
traditional voice calls between two people, as well as all types of e -mails, messaging
services or group talks. Interpersonal communications services only cover
communications between a finite, that is to say not potentially unlimited, number of
natural persons which is determined by the sender of the communication.
Communications involving legal persons should fall within the scope of the definition
where natural persons act on behalf of those legal persons or are involved at least on
one side of the communication. Interactive communication entails that the service allows
the recipient of the information to respond. Services which do not meet those
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requirements, such as linear broadcasting, video on demand, websites, social networks,
blogs, or exchange of information between machines, should not be considered as
interpersonal communications services. In exceptional circumstances a service should
not be considered to be an interpersonal communications service if the interpersonal and
interactive communication facility is a minor and purely ancillary feature to another
service and for objective technical reasons cannot be used without that principal service,
and its integration is not a means to circumvent the applicability of the rules governing
electronic communications services. As elements of an exemption from the definition the
terms ‘minor’ and ‘purely ancillary’ should be interpreted narrowly and from an objective
end-user’s perspective. An interpersonal communications feature could be considered
to be minor where its objective utility for an end-user is very limited and where it is in
reality barely used by end-users. An example of a feature that could be considered to fall
outside the scope of the definition of interpersonal communications services might be, in
principle, a communication channel in online games, depending on the features of the
communication facility of the service.
(18) Interpersonal communications services using numbers from a national and
international numbering plan connect with publicly assigned numbering resources.
Those number-based interpersonal communications services comprise both services to
which end-users numbers are assigned for the purpose of ensuring end -to-end
connectivity and services enabling end-users to reach persons to whom such numbers
have been assigned. The mere use of a number as an identifier should not be regarded
as equivalent to the use of a number to connect with publicly assigned numbers and
should therefore not be considered sufficient in itself to qualify a service as a number-
based interpersonal communications service. Number-independent interpersonal
communications services should be subject to obligations only where public interests
require that specific regulatory obligations apply to all type s of interpersonal
communications services, regardless of whether they use numbers for the provision of
their service. It is justified to treat number-based interpersonal communications services
differently, as they participate in, and hence also benefit f rom, a publicly assured
interoperable ecosystem.
Therefore, a number-based interpersonal electronic communications service
should allow for a direct, interpersonal and interactive exchange of information between
persons, without such interpersonal and interactive communication being included in the
service concerned as a mere secondary possibility.
Consequently, MIRACLIA is not a provider of electronic communications and
networks and does not provide electronic communications services.
Moreover, for the reasons set out above, this Agency considers that the doctrine of the
Constitutional Court relied on by MIRACLIA, which allows the recording of a personal
conversation by one of the participants, is not applicable to the present case. Nor does
it consider that the present case gives rise to any controversy affecting the citizens’ right
to freedom of expression.
MIRACLIA also points out, in its submissions on the draft decision, that
MIRACLIA is wrong to find that MIRACLIA is the owner of a mobile application known as
‘Juasapp’, indicating that it is a service accessed by means of a mobile app. However,
in relation to this issue, we refer to the many references in the document “Terms and
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Conditions of Use of the Service” on the “Juasapp” application (e.g. : ‘Definition of the
service: Juasapp is an application...”).
It also considers that the reference to the hosting of the jokes on a public site is incorrect
in so far as access to the audio is made via a private URL to which only the sender of
the joke and the recipient of it have access, if he so wishes. However, according to
MIRACLIA, what is stated in MIRACLIA is not contrary to what is stated by MIRACLIA
when it states that there is ‘no platform on which the gumps are published in order to be
accessible to any third party, but the recordings of the jokes are hosted on a public site,
which makes it possible for them to be accessed by means of the link to the audio file,
which can be disseminated indiscriminately by the bromist user’.
With regard to the findings made in 5, it is claimed that the link accessed by the Agency’s
inspection services to check that ‘Juasapp’ operates in other countries of the European
Economic Area corresponds to a pre-production platform that has never worked.
However, according to the Inspectorate, access was made from the Agency’s own offices
to information that was in production on that day, available to any third party user of the
network, that is to say, publicly available information. The Inspection Services have not
provided any access to MIRACLIA systems under development. In any event, this entity
does not dispute the information contained in the aforementioned Probation Event on
the functioning of the Juasapp application in the countries indicated and the availability
to the public of the terms and conditions of use in the languages mentioned.
With regard to the complaints set out in the Background, MIRACLIA repeatedly warns
that it should not be admissible, bearing in mind that the respective complainant did not
first address the organisation in exercising the rights conferred by the legislation on the
protection of personal data.
In this regard, on the one hand, it should be noted that, in the exercise of its powers and
prerogatives, the Agency determined as the subject of the proceedings the overall
analysis of the Juasapp application from the point of view of the rules on the protection
of personal data and in relation to the persons receiving the calls, irrespective of the
specific incidents of the complaints raised, which served to motivate the initiation of
appropriate investigations into the processing of the personal data of the persons
receiving the calls, regardless of the specific incidents of the complaints raised, which
served to justify the initiation of appropriate investigations into the processing of the
personal data of the persons receiving the calls; on the other hand, the exercise of those
rights is not established as a necessary budget in order to be able to lodge a complaint
with this Agency. The decision whether or not to lodge such a complaint or the use of
any other means for the defence of his or her rights is the sole decision of the
complainant. In any event, it should be noted that the decision adopted is the result of
the established facts and that no scope has been attributed to the questions raised by
MIRACLIA in relation to the representations made by the complainants concerning the
sending of the recording by whatsapp, the making of calls other than the call for jokes,
the sending of emails or the attention given by MIRACLIA to requests for exercise of
rights.
Unlike the present case, the precedent cited by MIRACLIA, which concerns the case of
a person who received a funeral call from a radio station, concerns a claim for the
protection of rights for failure to take care of the request for erasure of data which he had
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previously submitted to the controller, and as such was dealt with by that agency.
Finally, MIRACLIA asks for a face-to-face hearing in order to clarify the points
raised before the Agency’s investigators/inspectors and warns that, if its interests are not
met, it reserves the right to go to other higher or judicial bodies in Spain and Europe.
Such a hearing is not provided for in the applicable procedural rules, with the resu lt that
there is no obligation to do so, nor does it undermine the rights of the defence of the
entity concerned, which will obviously have the possibility of challenging the decision in
all the avenues provided for by that legislation.
X
In the event of an infringement of the provisions of the GDPR, among the
corrective powers available to the Spanish Data Protection Agency as a supervisory
authority, Article 58 (2) of that Regulation provides as follows:
“2 Each supervisory authority shall have all of the following corrective powers:
(...)
(b) sanction a controller or processor with warning where processing operations
have infringed the provisions of this Regulation; ”
(...)
(d) to order the controller or processor to comply with the provisions of this
Regulation, where applicable, in a specified manner and within a specified time limit;
(...)
(I) impose an administrative fine in accordance with Article 83, in addition to or
instead of the measures referred to in this paragraph, depending on the circumst ances
of each individual case; ’;
Pursuant to Article 83 (2) GDPR, the measure provided for in point (d) above is
compatible with the penalty consisting of an administrative fine.
XI
In the present case, it is established that MIRACLIA’s processing of
personal data is carried out without first informing the data subject and without standing
to do so.
The data subject does not know whether his or her personal data are being
processed by this entity, which uses an application designed to use personal da ta
provided by a third party and by the data subject himself. The application is created for
a purpose which requires the processing of personal data. Thanks to the app, the
telephone line to which the communication is sent is processed, recorded and
reproduced the conversation held by the interlocutors.
In accordance with the findings made, it is considered that the facts set out above
could breach the principle of transparency laid down in Articles 12, 13 and 14 of the
GDPR, as well as the principle of lawfulness of processing governed by Article 6 GDPR,
which, if confirmed, could entail the commission of the two offences defined in Article 83
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(5) GDPR, which, under the heading ‘General conditions for imposing administrative
fines’, provides as follows:
‘Infringements of the following provisions shall, in accordance with paragraph 2,
be subject to administrative fines of up to EUR 20 000 000 or, in the case of an
undertaking, up to 4 % of the total overall annual turnover of the preceding financial year,
whichever is higher:
(a) the basic principles for processing, including the conditions for consent under
Articles 5, 6, 7 and 9;
(b) the rights of data subjects under Articles 12 to 22; (...)’.
In that regard, Article 71 of the LOPDGDD provides that ‘[t] he acts and conduct
referred to in Article 83 (4), (5) and (6) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and those which are
contrary to this Organic Law shall constitute infringements’.
For the purposes of the limitation period, Article 72 of the LOPDGDD states:
‘Article 72. Infringements considered to be very serious.
1. In accordance with Article 83 (5) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679, infringements
which constitute a substantial infringement of the articles referred to therein, and in
particular the following, shall be considered to be very serious and shall be time-barred
after three years:
(...)
(b) the processing of personal data without one of the conditions for the
lawfulness of the processing laid down in Article 6 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 being
fulfilled.
(...)
(h) failure to inform the data subject of the processing of his personal data in
accordance with Articles 13 and 14 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and Article 12 of this
Organic Law’.
In order to determine the administrative fine to be imposed, the pro visions of Articles
83.1 and 83.2 of the GDPR must be observed, which state:
‘1. Each supervisory authority shall ensure that the imposition of administrative
fines pursuant to this Article in respect of infringements of this Regulation referred to in
paragraphs 4, 9 and 6 shall in each individual case be effective, proportionate and
dissuasive.
2. Administrative fines shall, depending on the circumstances of each individual
case, be imposed in addition to, or instead of, measures referred to in points (a ) to (h)
and (j) of Article 58(2).When deciding whether to impose an administrative fine and
deciding on the amount of the administrative fine in each individual case due regard shall
be given to the following:
(a) the nature, gravity and duration of the infringement, taking into account the
nature, scope or purpose of the processing operation concerned as well as the number
of data subjects concerned and the level of damage suffered by them;
(b) the intentional or negligent nature of the infringement;
(c) any action taken by the controller or processor to mitigate the damage suffered
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by data subjects;
(d) the degree of responsibility of the controller or processor, having regard to the
technical or organisational measures they have implemented pursuant to Articles 25 and
32;
(e) any previous infringement committed by the controller or processor;
(f) the degree of cooperation with the supervisory authority in order to remedy the
infringement and mitigate the possible adverse effects of the infringement;
(g) the categories of personal data concerned by the infringement;
(h) how the supervisory authority became aware of the infringement, in particular
whether and to what extent the controller or processor notified the infringement;
(I) where the measures referred to in Article 58(2) have been previously ordered
against the controller or processor concerned in relation to the same matter, compliance
with those measures;
(j) adherence to codes of conduct under Article 40 or to certification mechanisms
approved pursuant to Article 42; and
(K) any other aggravating or mitigating factors applicable to the circumstances of
the case, such as financial profits gained or losses avoided, directly or indirectly, through
the infringement.”
Article 76 ‘Penalties and corrective measures’ of the LOPDGDD provides:
‘1. The penalties provided for in Article 83 (4), (5) and (6) of Regulation (EU)
2016/679 shall be applied taking into account the graduation criteria set out in paragraph
2 of that Article.
2. In accordance with Article 83 (2) (k) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679, account may
also be taken of:
(a) the continued nature of the infringement;
(b) linking the offender’s activity to the processing of personal data.
(c) the profits made as a result of the infringement.
(d) the possibility that the conduct of the person concerned might have led to the
commission of the infringement.
(e) the existence of a merger by acquisition after the infringement has been
committed, which cannot be attributed to the acquiring entity.
(f) the allocation to the rights of minors.
(g) provide, where this is not required, a data protection officer.
(h) referral by the controller or processor, on a voluntary basis, to alternative
dispute resolution mechanisms in cases where there is a dispute between them and any
data subject.”
In accordance with the provisions set out above, for the purpose of determining the
amount of the fines to be imposed in the present case on the defendant, who is
responsible for the offences referred to in Article 83 (5) ( a) and (b) of the GDPR, the fine
to be imposed for each of the alleged infringements should be graduated.
It is considered that, as aggravating factors, applicable to the two breaches of the
GDPR for which MIRACLIA is held responsible, the following facto rs indicate greater
unlawfulness or guilt in the conduct of the entity:
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.The nature, gravity and duration of the infringement, taking into account the
nature, scope or purpose of the processing operations concerned: the seriousness of the
infringement is determined by the processing operations carried out by MIRACLIA itself,
which include the collection of personal data in order to make them available to third
parties, providing them with functionalities or tools for the dissemination of such personal
data, even though their processing is contrary to the GDPR.The duration of the
infringement, considering that it is linked to the very functioning of the Juasapp
application, is determined by the period of operation of that application.
.The intentional or negligent nature of the infringement: this is the result of the
very design of the application, which has in no way provided for compliance with the
rules on the protection of personal data. This is a particularly significant aggravating
factor, since, without any doubt, the applicant was aware of the shortcomings identified
by the Agency in the operation of the application from a number of precedents, in which
it was penalised for breach of the principle of consent. MIRACLIA does not ignore the
fact that its conduct is in breach of the GDPR and decided to proceed with it.
.The continuing nature of the infringement: result of the uninterrupted operation
of the Juasapp application.
.The link between the activity of the offender and the processing of personal data
and benefits obtained as a result of the commission of the infringement: all the operations
which constitute the commercial or commercial activity carried out by the respondent
involve the processing of personal data, all of which are affected by the same breaches
of the rules. Thus, all the profits of this business are the result and consequence of the
permanent breach of data protection law for which the respondent is responsible.
.The volume of data and processing which is the subject of the dossie r; and
number of stakeholders: it is taken into account that the perceived defects in data
processing affect all those who receive a joke call using the ‘Juasapp’ app.
.The nature of the damage caused to the persons concerned or to third parties:
the damage that may result from the processing and dissemination of the data is
unpredictable, without any caution being taken by MIRACLIA in this respect.
.The accused entity does not have adequate procedures in place for the collection
and processing of personal data, so that the infringement is not the result of an anomaly
in the operation of those procedures, but a defect in the personal data management
system designed by the controller.
On the basis of the factors set out above, the initial assessment of the fine
contained in the decision to initiate proceedings amounted to EUR 50,000 per house of
one of the alleged infringements.
However, in its written pleadings, the undertaking requested a reduction
in that fine, since it represents 25 % of its turnover, which amounted to EUR 476,000 in
2018, in which losses were incurred.
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The financial information available for MIRACLIA relates to the
year 2018, the last financial year submitted. There is a turnover for that financial year of
EUR 475,823 and a profit or loss of EUR -7,364. It is also found that this is a micro-
enterprise with 2 employees. According to the information in the Central Companies
Register, the ‘subscribed capital’ amounts to EUR 6,000.
In view of this, it is considered appropriate to propose the imposition of a fine of
EUR 20,000 for each of the infringements committed (infringement of the principle of
transparency for non-compliance with Articles 13 and 14 of the GDPR, which is defined
in Article 83 (5) (b)) and classified as very serious for the purposes of limitation in Article
72 (h) of the LOPDGDD; infringement for failure to comply with the provisions of Article
6 of the GDPR, as defined in Article 83 (5) (a) and classified as very serious for the
purposes of prescription in Article 72 (1) (b) of the LOPDGDD].
XII
In accordance with Article 58 (2) (d) GDPR, each supervisory authority may
“order the controller or processor to comply with the provisions of this Regulation, where
appropriate, in a specific manner and within a specified time limit...”.
In this case, having regard to the circumstances expressed in relation to the identified
shortcomings in the functioning of the Juasapp application, from the point of view of data
protection law, MIRACLIA should be required to comply, within a period to be
determined, with the rules on the protection of personal data, the processing operations
it carries out, the information provided to its customers and the procedure by which they
give their consent to the collection and processing of their personal data; it also
establishes mechanisms to establish that the data subject has effectively accessed the
information provided and that he or she has given his or her consent to the collection
and processing of the personal data. All of this is within the scope and in the sense
expressed in the grounds of the present judgment.
In cases where the data subject was not duly informed about the circumstances
covered by Articles 13 and 14 GDPR or the data subject did not consent, MIRACLIA will
not be able to carry out the collection and processing of the personal data.
Moreover, it is appropriate that MIRACLIA cease the unlawful use of personal
data contained in its information systems relating to data subjects who have not given
their informed consent to that end.
These measures shall apply in all countries of the European Economic Area in
which MIRACLIA operates through the Juasapp application and in respect of persons
residing in those countries.
It should be noted that failure to comply with the requests made by that body may
be regarded as a serious administrative infringement because it ‘does not cooperate with
the supervisory authority’ in the light of the requests made, and such conduct may be
assessed at the time of the opening of an administrative procedure leading to a fine.
Therefore, in accordance with the above, the Director of the Spanish Data
Protection Agency DECIDES:
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FIRST: On the basis of the complaint received through the IMI system referred to
in Antecedente Seventh and in accordance with the facts and points of law contained in
this act, adopt a draft decision on the penalty proceedings against MIRACLIA
TELECOMUNICACIONES, S.L., which will lead, where appropriate, to the adoption of
the following agreements:
1. Penalise the entity MIRACLIA TELECOMUNICACIONES, S.L., for an
infringement of Articles 13 and 14 of the GDPR, which is defined in Article 83 (5) (b) and
classified as very serious for the purposes of limitation in Article 72 (h) of the LOPDGDD,
with a fine of EUR 20,000 (twenty thousand euros).
2. Penalise the entity MIRACLIA TELECOMUNICACIONES, S.L., for an
infringement of Article 6 of the GDPR, referred to in Article 83 (5) (a) and classified as
very serious for the purposes of limitation in Article 72 (1) (b) of t he LOPDGDD, with a
fine of EUR 20,000 (twenty thousand euros).
3. Require MIRACLIA TELECOMUNICACIONES, S.L to comply, within three
months, with the rules on the protection of personal data, the processing operations it
carries out, the information provided to its clients and the procedure by which they must
give their consent to the collection and processing of their personal data, to the extent
stated in Article XII of Law. This should also be implemented in all the countries of the
European Economic Area in which MIRACLIA operates through the Juasapp application.
SECOND: In accordance with the procedure laid down in Article 60 of the GDPR,
this draft penalty decision is transmitted through the IMI system without delay to the
supervisory authorities concerned, informing them that, in the event that no objections
are raised within four weeks of the consultation, the mandatory decision on the penalty
procedure will be adopted, in which the infringements referred to in the grounds of law
will be declared, with the imposition of the penalties and measures indicated.
Communications
According to Article 60.7 of the GDPR, as lead supervisory authority, the Spain -SA shall
adopt and notify the decision to the main establishment or single establishment of the
controller or processor, as the case may be and inform the other supervisory authorities
concerned and the Board of the decision in question, including a summary of the relevant
facts and grounds.
The supervision authority with which a complaint has been lodged shall inform the
complainant on the decision.
Chair of the Spain-SA
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