Noyb charges Swedish tax authority for selling citizens’ private information to data brokers

The Swedish tax authority not only collects personal and sensitive information of taxpayers, but also sells this data to commercial data brokers, who then publish it online. This is a violation of EU law. Therefore, noyb has taken this matter to court.

It’s common sense that a country’s government collects personal information about its citizens, such as date of birth, social security number, marital status, residence, income, and so on. This information is needed to calculate how much you have to pay in taxes.

What doesn’t make sense, however, is that this information is being sold by the tax authority to data brokers and published online for everyone to see. In return, third parties make a profit from selling the data to anyone who’s interested, without a single safeguard or restriction.

This has raised concerns about potential violations of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Earlier this year, a Swedish taxpayer asked the country’s tax authority to stop selling his data, arguing that such processing is illegal and should be restricted. However, the tax authority rejected this request by saying it was simply following the Swedish constitutional principle of transparency.

In addition, the Swedish Supreme Court concluded that there needs to be a balance between Swedish freedom of information law and EU data protection law. If the processing of data violates the GDPR, it should be marked as confidential. This confidentiality should prohibit data brokers from obtaining the personal data of people living in Sweden.

Despite this ruling, the Swedish tax authority continues its data-selling practices.

In response, the Austrian privacy advocacy group Noyb is taking legal action. It has filed an appeal with the Stockholm Administrative Court, requesting that the tax authority restrict the sharing of personal information of Swedish taxpayers with commercial data brokers because it deprives people of their fundamental right to privacy.

“When I pay taxes in my home country, I expect the tax authority to use my data for this exact purpose, and not to feed commercial data brokers for them to make a profit. Publishing people’s tax data for everyone to see, clearly violates the fundamental right to data protection. The tax authority needs to reconsider their data sharing practices after the Supreme Court judgment, and start marking things confidential as soon as possible,” Joakim Söderberg, data protection lawyer at Noyb, says in a statement.