Claimants whose claims for infringement of data protection rights were dismissed by the English High Court on the basis that they had not provided evidence to show their pension benefits statements (sent to the wrong addresses by the administrator of their employer’s pension scheme) had been seen by someone other than themselves (and therefore no processing had occurred) have been granted permission to appeal this ruling.
The claimants claimed that the extraction of the information from the database, electronic transfer of the data to the paper document, along with the mistaken address, constituted processing, without the need to rely on a third party reading the statement and the Court of Appeal considered that this claim had a real prospect of success and so granted permission to appeal.
This will be an interesting one to watch with regard to the definition of “processing” and where its limits lie and whether there can be a case for infringement even in the absence of processing (another potential angle raised by the claimants).
The full judgment can be found here.
