noyb sues CRIF and AZ Direct for illegal and secret data processing

Credit Scoring noyb has filed a lawsuit against the credit reference agency CRIF GmbH and the address trader AZ Direct. The companies secretly trade the address data of almost every adult in Austria. By doing so, CRIF obtains information that was actually collected for advertising purposes - in order to calculate credit ratings. As the Austrian data protection authority confirmed in two decisions, this violates the GDPR. noyb is now suing for injunctive relief and damages, among other things. Lawsuit against CRIF and AZ Direct (DE)Data protection violations as a business model. The address trader AZ Direct (part of the Bertelsmann Group) regularly provides personal information such as name, address, date of birth and gender of Austrians to the credit reference agency CRIF. This is illegal, as address publishers are only allowed to share this data for advertising purposes. In reality, however, CRIF uses the data to calculate people's (supposed) creditworthiness. This can have far-reachi