Majority of credit bureau "CRIF" database illegal

Credit Scoring The frequently criticized credit referencing agency CRIF GmbH has collected addresses, dates of birth and names of almost all Austrians in order to calculate "creditworthiness values" without consent or any other legal basis. The Austrian Data Protection Authority (DPA) has now ruled in a test case that this data was processed illegally. Millions of data records must be deleted. Decision of the data protection authority (German)Autotranslated Decision (English)Link to the test case of noybAddress publisher illegally gives personal data to credit referencing agency. Most of the core data (name, address, date of birth, gender) that CRIF uses to calculate questionable "creditworthiness values" came from the address publisher AZ Direkt (which belongs to the German Bertelsmann Group). AZ Direct is only allowed to pass on this data only for marketing purposes - not for credit rating calculations. Nevertheless, the data of millions of Austrians (almost the entire resident popul