Hi !
This is a newsletter where we are asking for your help. More precisely, we are asking you to respond to this newsletter and tell us how you have dealt with special categories of personal data.
What do we mean by this?
Let's dive into the "problem" of special categories of personal data in cloud services like Google Workspace for Education or Microsoft 365!
How special categories of personal data are overlooked
Many of us in the national DPIA project have conducted DPIAs for solutions like Google Workspace for Education or Microsoft 365 before. A common feature of these solutions is that they facilitate communication between people, for example, through a chat function or email.
When people communicate, we WILL exchange sensitive information or special categories of personal data.
What is considered special categories of personal data is defined in GDPR article 9(1) as information about:
• Racial or ethnic origin
• Political opinions
• Religious or philosophical beliefs
• Trade union membership
• Genetic data and biometric data
• Data concerning health
• Data concerning a natural person’s sex life or sexual orientation
This is simply how we humans operate. If you have a colleague you regularly "talk to" electronically, you WILL share information about your sick leave, who your partner is, or that you're attending the Pirate
Party's national meeting tonight.
The harsh truth is that in DPIAs, we often overlook how people actually use the solution. Our claim is that most data controllers end up saying, "no one should share this type of personal information," and then they stop there.
Five cases from Iceland - the challenge of processing special categories of personal data
Why is it no longer sufficient to ignore that we process special categories of personal data in Google Workspace for Education?
Well, we have recently seen five cases where the Icelandic Data Protection Authority fined five municipalities in Iceland for using the solution. One of the issues identified by the Data Protection
Authority was that the municipalities were actually processing special categories of personal data without considering data privacy compliance.
What is the challenge of processing special categories of personal data in a system like Google Workspace for Education?
There are several, but the first that strikes us, coming from the more legal side of privacy, is that you then need a processing basis under GDPR Article 9.
How have you solved this?
So, our questions to you are:
- How have you handled this in the system you use, be it Google Workspace or Microsoft 365?
- Have you documented that you process special categories of personal data? If not, have you overlooked it? Or have you informed your users that they should not share this type of information? Or something else?
- What legal basis for processing are you using?
I wish you a wonderful, privacy-friendly week-end!
Best regards,
Ida Thorsrud
Project manager national DPIA
This newsletter was translated from Norwegian to English with assistance from ChatGPT by OpenAI. While it guided our translation, we made independent editorial choices. Any discrepancies result from this combined approach.