The Spanish Agency for Data Protection (AEPD) has sanctioned a real estate agency with 6,000 euros for publishing images of a house in which the tenants of the apartment are identified in several family photographs, as published by La Voz de Galicia. Among them are the couple's youngest daughters.
The tenants themselves were the ones who turned to the agency after the agency contacted them on behalf of the owners of the house. The reason was to "check the condition of the property", a common possibility among rental contracts. The real estate agency sent an employee to take photos of the house, although their purpose was not to check the condition of the house.
The real reason for capturing images was to illustrate an advertisement published on the real estate website to sell the house. However, in many of the snapshots there are images of the couple and their underage daughters that they have located in the fridge and in the bedrooms.
The AEPD recalls in its resolution that "the image of a natural person is personal data" and that, according to this consideration, the "principle of minimization" should have been respected. As Jordi Morera, legal expert at Govertis, explained in La Voz de Galicia, this principle "obliges those responsible for the treatment, in this case the sanctioned entity, to only process the adequate, pertinent and limited data to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed".
Morera says that to avoid capturing images where photographs of people appear, the perspectives must be studied when taking the image or ask the parents if they can remove the photographs while they are being captured. You can even do editing work after taking the images to pixelate the photographs, but it is something that has not been done either.
With all these breaches, in addition to the aggravating circumstance as they were minors, the offense was classified as serious, and in principle an initial penalty of 10,000 euros was imposed. However, the company paid the amount of the fine within the voluntary term, in addition to acknowledging its responsibility. All this has meant that they have been able to take advantage of a 20% reduction and pay a final amount of 6,000 euros.
