Tag: Subject Access Request

Is an exam personal data?

11. May 2016

EU data protection legislation has been lately updated in several aspects. Last week, the GDPR was finally published in the Official Journal of the EU, also the Passenger Name Record (PNR) Directive and the Directive related to criminal records held by authorities have been published in the Official Journal of the EU.

In this evolving landscape, new questions related to the application of EU data protection legislation are arising. Recently, the Irish Supreme Court raised a question to the ECJ related to the scope of application of the definition of personal data. A man that took an accounting exam exercised his right to data subject access request regarding this exam on the basis of Irish Data Protection Laws. However, this access request was refused based on the argument that the data he wrote on the accounting exam could not be referred to as “personal data”, as it was not his “own” personal data, but data related to the subject of the exam in question.

According to the EU definition, personal data is “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person”. The scope of this definition is essential in order to determine if data protection laws are applicable or not. In this case, the ECJ will have to answer to this question in a preliminary ruling. In a similar case, an applicant for a Dutch residence permit exercised an access request, which had been refused. The refusal was based on a legal opinion. The ECJ stated that a legal opinion refers to a situation and not to personal data. However, counter-arguments may be given in order to support the inclusion of an exam in the definition of personal data, such as the person´s handwriting or the remarks of the examiner that may be related to the person who wrote the exam, etc.

The ECJ will have to decide whether such data is subject to data protection legislation and, therefore, the data subject access request should be accepted.