Address broker: GDPR-compliance "too burdensome"

On Tuesday, noyb filed a GDPR complaint against the Vienna-based address broker AZ Direct Österreich GmbH. The company, which belongs to the Bertelsmann group, had refused to provide information on the origin and recipients of the data processed. The reasons given were shocking: The address broker claims not to know where the data came from – it would have been too burdensome to record that. Nevertheless, data is collected day in, day out and sold to advertisers. These recipients who receive data from AZ Direct were also not revealed. Download: Complaint to the Austrian data protection authority Data of allegedly unknown origin and made-up legal provisions. The data subject had sent an access request under Article 15 GDPR to AZ Direct. He also asked from where the address publisher had collected his data and to whom it had been sold. AZ Direct stated that, among other things, it had stored (former) residential addresses of the data subject. However, the address broker claimed not to kn