The Jehovah's Witnesses community must respect the rules on data processing as part of their door-to-door preaching activities according to Advocate General Paolo Mengozzi in the conclusions submitted to the European Court of Justice on Thursday 1 February (Case C-25/17).
When they carry out their door-to-door activities, the Jehovah's Witnesses in Finland take notes on the people they meet. This information (names, addresses, religious conviction, family relations) are collected in an effort to relocate useful information for subsequent visits but the people affected are not informed about the processing of their personal data.
The Finnish data protection commission has banned this community from collecting and processing data obtained from their preaching activities because the Jehovah's Witnesses are subject, “as those responsible for the processing” of personal data, to the obligations of directive 95/46. The Finnish courts are calling on the European Court of Justice to establish whether these rules apply in this case. If the response is in the affirmative, then should the community as a whole be considered responsible for data processing or just the individuals carrying out the visits?
In his conclusions, Mengozzi is of the opinion that preaching activities in which the personal data of people visited are collected supersedes the domestic sphere for processing data. The collection and processing of personal data carried out by a religious community as part of its door-to-door preaching activity is therefore not excluded from the directive's scope.
Under the terms of the directive, those responsible for processing, “is the natural and legal person, authority, service or any other body that exclusively or with others, decide the purposes and means of processing personal data".
According to the Advocate General, there is a sufficient body of evidence to suggest that the Jehovah's Witnesses community decides the outcome for the processing of the personal data collected by the membership, insofar as the objective is to permanently increase the number of followers by way of preaching and through the optimum preparation of visits. The community therefore provides very practical instructions in taking notes through the articles published in its magazine. According to the Advocate General, the community can therefore be considered responsible for the processing, even if it does not itself have access to the personal data collected by its members. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)