Can Slack really claim not to be a data controller? I'm an EU resident. I just sent in a GDPR removal request to Slack. Their response: Per our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, your Workspace Primary Owner (Customer) controls Customer Data. Customer owns all of the submitted content, including profile information, and Slack processes Customer Data on the Customer's behalf: https://slack.com/privacy-policy#collect. A Workspace Primary Owner, as the data controller, is responsible for determining whether profile information requires deletion. If you wish, you may also want to reach out to your Workspace Primary Owners as we can only delete profile information upon their request. If you have any questions about this process, please refer to this page in our Help Center: https://get.slack.help/hc/articles/360000360443-Delete-your-profile-info-from-Slack Somehow this doesn't feel right. Slack claims that the organisation (or person in many cases) running the Slack is the data controller, but the &quot;data controller&quot; doesn't even have normal access to more than 10000 messages if they're not paying Slack. Does this make sense legally? And what if this &quot;data controller&quot; doesn't comply to my request? Or is dead or doesn't even exist anymore? Isn't it Slack's responsibility to remove my data in this case? This reddit thread is related. Which got me to 1a of [Article 17 of the GDPR], that states the personal data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed; To me this clearly applies to most (probably all) of the Slacks that I was on, since most of my data (i.e. messages) are not even visible anymore. Is this correct?
The GDPR's right to erasure just applies in some specific situations. While messages you wrote on Slack are personal data, they are generally also part of a larger discussion with others. If your messages are removed, the discussion becomes incomplete, so that will violate the freedom of expression of those others. Art. 17(3) GDPR provides an exception for the right of erasure in such cases. So basically, whoever is the controller, you probably don't have the right to have your messages to be deleted. However, you would have the right to have your account pseudonymized like Slack replied in the Reddit post you linked to. See also my answer in "Does a user have the right to request their forum posts deleted?". Basically, it is correct that Slack can be just the processor. Even if the controller cannot get access to more than 10000 messages unless they pay. However, Slack is not allowed to do anything with those messages, except when the controller says so. In its Privacy Policy, Slack distinguishes between customer data and other data. It states to be the processor for the customer data, but controller for the other data. Because those are tied together, I am not sure this distinction can be made. If not, Slack and the customer will be joint controllers, but it requires probably a court case to decide on that. For example, the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled (in the Fashion ID case) that putting a Facebook "like" button on your website, makes you a joint controller together with Facebook. And (in the Wirtschaftsakademie case) that also creating a Facebook "fan" page makes you a joint controller. But neither of those are very similar to the situation with Slack.
I understand that storing any hash or IP that can identify &quot;user uniquely&quot; is against GDPR. That is not correct. However any data which is identifiably associated with a an individual human, including any data which could be used to identify that human, is generally &quot;Personal data&quot;, and may not be processed (which includes storing it) without a lawful basis, if the GDPR applies. Any of the six lawful bases allowed by the GDPR may be used, including consent, and the legitimate interest of the data controller. The GDPR does not generally specify that particular technological solutions are permitted or forbidden. If this usage pattern could reasonably be used to identify a particular person, or to single out a person from among a group of people, it is probably personal data, and a lawful basis would be required. Otherwise, not. As for whether such a person is &quot;identifiable&quot; if use of this technique permits the Data Controller to identify two visits at separate times as having been made by the same person, when the later visit is still in progress or is recent, the IP for that visit will still be available, and thus could be associated with the first visit as well. And even if that is not done, such a technique could permit building a profile of such a person, including the actions taken on different visits. I think that would be enough to make this &quot;personal data&quot;.
That GDPR Disclaimer is no protection in some jurisdictions: the applicable laws to that situation in germany for example don't care about the GDPR: Cold calling, mailing, or e-mailing private people to advertise services all is handled by the same law: Without the consent it is expressly illegal under §7 of the law against unfair competition (Gesetz gegen unlauteren Wettbewerb UWG) and such cases are rather Slam-Dunk if the origin can be made out. The punishment can be a 300.000 € fine. The fact that to email someone you need their e-mail address and that e-mail addresses and private addresses are by default considered personally identifiable information is making it worse for the advertizer: Without either an exception (there is none available to cold-emailing) or special allowance of the person the data belongs to, you violate §4 of the federal data protection law (Bundesdatenschutzgesetzes BDSG) just by handling their e-mail address. That's a separate crime from the UWG one, adding up to another 300.000 € fine under §43 BDSG - or even up to 2 years in prison under §44 BDSG! Oh, and if the email does not contain a proper sender's address, that's another chance for a huge fine under the UWG... So, GDPR is your least trouble, if you violate the marketing laws of a country, or their own data privacy laws. A disclaimer means nothing as the act of sending the mail, even to an unintended addressee, is what is illegal and the law as written does not give a damn about 'I didn't want to advertise to that person' when in fact you sent them unwanted advertisements. Oh, and the very repository you suggest? It would violate the very same §4 BDSG and be illegal for processing private data if it was not actively asked to do that by the end user. As a result, that database is useless: It does kick back all people not in its database. Its database is incomplete because only few people give their address to that database as people not aware of the database never add their data on their own. So it regularly violates §4 BDSG with every German citizen's e-mail address it gets and kicks back, and claiming those addresses would be OK, it throws the company trying to check the database under the bus because they rely on data that is impossible to be reliable. tl;dr Don't do cold-(e)-mail marketing. You throw yourself into boiling oil with a lit torch in hand. further reading Other laws banning such behavior I had listed here, and I quote myself: The US has the CAN-SPAM-Act, which illegalizes sending unsocialised advertisements. You may NOT send a mail if any of the following is true: it has no opt-out the email was gained by 'harvesting' contains a header not matching the text contains less than one sentence the adressee does not have any relation to you In fact, you are liable for a 5-digit fine per infringing e-mail in the US. The FTC itself suggests to never buy e-mail lists - as E-mail harvesting or generating any possible e-mail adress itself is illegal.
I agree with Ben that there are many exemptions to the right to be forgotten. For example if messages are removed from a mailing list archive, the replies to deleted messages will become useless. That would impact the right of freedom of expression and information of those authors. That is one of the exemptions to the right to be forgotten. So there is no right to delete complete messages. Replacing references to names and email addresses, is a very good solution. It must not be possible to de-anomize the data. So having anon-20190213-123@example.org, it must not be possible to get back A. Person &lt;a.person@example.org&gt;. Sure, everyone who received a copy of those messages can find that message in their own archive, and see the author that way. But that is because they simply have a copy of the full archive. The right to be forgotten is independent of someone else having the same information you request to delete. For example google removes search results in its index, even though the same information can still be found on the original website. To fully exercise the right to be forgotten, you have to make a request to everyone who has that data. In Austria there is a recent case (ECLI:AT:DSB:2018:DSB.D123.270.0009.DSB.2018) (available only in German) where someone's data was anonymized after asserting his &quot;right to be forgotten&quot;. He did not agree and wanted his data to be fully deleted, so he filed a complaint at the Austrian DPA. The DPA denied his request. I have tried to make a translation of the relevant part of the judgment, note that many references are to other Austrian judgments or books (where I listed the ISBN instead). D.1 The binding part of the GDPR does not contain the term &quot;anonymisation&quot;. Only recital 26 states that the GDPR does not apply to anonymous data. D.2 The term &quot;erasure of personal data&quot; as used in Art. 17 is neither found in the binding part nor in the recitals. In Art. 4(2) erasure and destruction are listed as alternative forms of processing which are not necessary identical. This means that erasure does not necessarily requires final destruction. (cf. K121.375/0012-DSK/2008, with regard to Directive 95/46/EC, where also a distinction was made between erasure and destruction; cf. ISBN 978-3-406-72006-2). Such a differentiation also results from the case-law of the Constitutional Court (cf. VfSlg. 19.937/2014). Therefore, the person in charge is entitled to make a choice with regard to the means - i.e. the manner in which the data is deleted - (cf. again ISBN 978-3-406-72006-2, according to which reference is made to the destruction of keys or other decryption devices without the removal of the data itself; cf. in this sense also ISBN 978-3-406-71932-5, which refers to the impossibility of perceiving the information previously embodied in the data to be deleted; cf. also ISBN 978-3-406-72007-9, according to which deletion is to be understood as any kind of conceilment of stored personal data; cf. also Warter, Dako 2/2018, 39 [40], according to which the result of the deletion action is decisive). The removal of the personal reference from personal data (&quot;anonymisation&quot;) can thus in principle be a possible means of deletion within the meaning of Art. 4(2) in conjunction with Art. 17(1) GDPR. However, it must be ensured that neither the person responsible himself nor a third party can restore a personal reference without disproportionate effort (cf. RS0125838, according to which it is not sufficient to merely change the data organisation in such a way that &quot;targeted access&quot; is not possible any more; cf. also the judgment of the CJEU of 19 October 2016, C-582/14, 45 ff.). Only if the person responsible aggregates the data in a way that no data can be identified, can the resulting data stock be described as anonymous (i.e. without personal reference) (see Opinion 05/2014 on Anonymisation Techniques of the former Art. 29 Data Protection Working Party, WP216, p. 10). The Administrative Court has also ruled - with regard to the comparable legal situation under the DSG 2000 - that a redaction (blacking out), for example, can be regarded as a form of deletion. By making the name of the data subject and all other data relating to him or her unrecognisable, his or her request for deletion is complied with (cf. the decision of 23 November 2009, 2008/05/0079). So anonymisation is sufficient to comply with a right to be forgotten request.
I think there are a couple of different ways to look at this. Deduplication is a technical detail that's irrelevant here While the data may be deduplicated on a technical level, the files remain logically distinct. If users 1 and 2 upload identical files, and then one user edits or deletes their file, this will not affect the other user's data. Users cannot tell whether their files are duplicates of someone else. From the user's perspective, it makes no difference whether or not the storage uses deduplication, except perhaps via the cost of the service. Because there is no user-perceptible difference, it would be difficult to interpret some GDPR significance into this scenario. Whose personal data is it anyway? Personal data is any information that relates to an identifiable data subject. The files here are likely to be their uploader's personal data. Thus, the uploaders would also have a right to have their uploaded files erased. In case of deduplicated storage, this would affect their logical copy. The contents of the uploaded files might also be personal data relating to a third party. Then that third party might have a right to get the file contents erased. But this right must be invoked with the data controller for that processing activity, which might be company A, company B, or the uploaders, depending on context. Which leads us to the next aspect: Company A is not responsible for handling erasures From your description, it sounds like company A is a data processor providing services on behalf of company B. In turn, B might be a processor acting on behalf of the uploaders. In any case, it seems that A would not be the data controller for these processing activities. Data subject rights like erasure must be invoked against the controller, as only the controller can understand whether such a request should be granted. The right to erasure is not absolute, and depends a lot on why that data is being processed. In particular: Personal data need not be erased if it is still necessary For example, a person might very well be the data subject of some of these files, and might then ask for erasure. But if the files are being stored because they are going to be needed as evidence in legal proceedings, the data subject can't use this GDPR right to destroy evidence. The data controller would be allowed to refuse a request in such cases. It could now happen that two different users of this deduplicated storage are storing the same file, but for entirely different purposes. Blanket deletion of all copies of a file could be quite problematic. Note that deletion is also a &quot;processing activity&quot; and needs a legal basis under the GDPR. Unexpected data loss could be a data breach. One user's erasure could be another user's reportable data breach incident. Thus, I would strongly expect such requests to be handled on a logical file level, not on the deduplicated storage level. Caveat: public access and cloned files If the (logical) file is made available to the public who can then clone or copy this file, and if the &quot;original&quot; is taken down due to an erasure request (or copyright takedown notice), it might be appropriate to remove logical clones as well. Again, this might not involve deleting the contents on the deduplicated storage level, but it might affect other users' copies. In a GDPR context, the grounds for this would be the Art 17(2) right to be forgotten: Where the controller has made the personal data public and is obliged pursuant to paragraph 1 to erase the personal data, the controller, taking account of available technology and the cost of implementation, shall take reasonable steps, including technical measures, to inform controllers which are processing the personal data that the data subject has requested the erasure by such controllers of any links to, or copy or replication of, those personal data. But this depends crucially on who those other controllers are. If A is the sole controller, the logical files could probably be deleted directly. If B or the end users are controllers, it could be more appropriate to forward the erasure request to them.
The GDPR is about "processing" not "storing", so your actions definitely fall under the GDPR. Also you have stored the email address and the email you sent in your "Sent" folder. You need to reply with all the information you have associated with that email address. This will at least be the email you already sent. If you scraped the email address from GitHub then you have it in a table with (presumably) other information such as the repository where you found it, in which case send that row of the table with the associated column headers. If you really just have a list of email addresses then say so. If you merely saw the email address and then typed a fresh email then say so.
From the GDPR's definitions: ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person; This blurred image would be &quot;information relating to an identified ... natural person (‘data subject’).&quot; It does not matter whether the person can be identified using the information in question. Therefore, the answer to your question Under GDPR, does blurhash of a profile picture count as personal data is yes.
Your VPN scenario is why you have to show the banner to everyone. If you somehow knew beyond any doubt that someone was not in the EU, then you would not have to show a banner, but because you can't verify that, you should always show the banner. Doing so also protects against accidentally violating a similar law in another country; the GDPR is the best-known privacy law, but it is far from the only one. It's good practice to ask for people's permission before collecting their information anyway.