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10 Int'l Data Priv. L. 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/intldatpc10 and id is 1 raw text is: International Data Privacy Law, 2020, Vol. 10, No. 1 Opinions can be incorrect (in our opinion)! On data protection law's accuracy principle Dara Hallinan* and Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius** Introduction Since the early 1970s, the accuracy principle has been a bulwark of data protection law. Roughly summarized, the principle says that organizations that use personal data must ensure that personal data are reasonably cor- rect. The accuracy principle is included in many data protection and information privacy statutes around the world. The principle is also listed as one of the over- arching data protection principles in the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).' Even despite the significance and track-record of the accuracy principle in data protection law, neither courts nor scholars have felt it necessary to spend much time * Dara Hallinan, IGR, FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz-Institut fur Informationsinfrastruktur, Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany. E-mail: dara.hallinan@fiz-karls- ruhe.de. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Noel Bangma. ** Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, iHub and Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS), Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. or ink elaborating the content of the principle. Perhaps the principle is presumed to be simple and self- explanatory and thus without need for conscious explo- ration. As the UK Information Commissioner's Office has observed: 'It will usually be obvious whether per- sonal data is accurate'.2 Yet, for some types of personal data, the applicability of the principle is far from self-explanatory. One such case is that of personal data in the form of opinions- also known as inferences: personal data constituting an assertion about an data subject, built on the back of facts about that subject, subjected to some interpretative framework to produce new, probable facts about that data subject. The issue of the applicability of the accuracy princi- ple to personal data in the form of opinions has been touched on by scholars, but not discussed in depth. Moreover, scholars reach contradictory conclusions. The issue is not addressed in case law of the ECtHR or the CJEU. This article thus focuses on the following question: are personal data in the form of opinions sub- ject to data protection law's accuracy principle, and should they be? Considering both pro and contra positions, we ar- gue that personal data in the form of opinions are, and should be, subject to data protection law's accu- racy principle. To keep the discussion in the paper manageable, we focus on one example of data protec- tion law: the GDPR. Nevertheless, our analysis and conclusions are generally applicable to all privacy and data protection acts which include an accuracy princi- ple-most privacy and data protection laws the world over. 1 Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation), OJ 2016 L 119/1, art 5(1)(d). 2 See: <https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/ guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/principles/accu racy/> accessed 10 October 2019. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 1

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