The Supreme Administrative Court has ruled that a land and mortgage register number is personal data

The SAC dismissed the Surveyor General's cassation appeal of 5 May 2021 against the judgment of the Provincial Administrative Court (“PAC”), and thus agreed with the lower instance court and the President of the PDPO that land and mortgage register numbers are personal data in the meaning of Article 4 GDPR and their publication without any legal grounds is in breach of the personal data protection laws.

The SAC’s judgment also confirms that the President of the PDPO was right to impose a fine of 100,000 zloty on the Surveyor General of Poland (“SGP”) in 2020 for disclosing land register numbers on the Geoportal2 website.

Disclosure of the land and mortgage register number enables identification of the person whose details are entered in the register. Every interested Internet user can access the information included in the register using the land and mortgage register numbers published on websites. The data disclosed in the land and mortgage register include e.g. the real property holder’s full name, the parents’ names, the holder's personal identification number PESEL, the real property address, and the information about any incurred financial liabilities, such as mortgage, and how the title to the real property was obtained.  Easy access to these data puts a very large number of data subjects at risk of having their identities stolen.

Publishing land and mortgage register numbers may pose dangers to many data subjects. Land and mortgage register data may be used contrary to the original processing purposes; this includes unauthorised profiling of property owners or identity theft. 

In the first-instance proceedings, the PAC not only shared the supervising authority’s view that land and mortgage registers are personal data, but also emphasised that the SGP, by its actions, even made it easier for the Geoportal2 website users to directly access the contents of the land and mortgage registers. The PAC stated that the land and mortgage register numbers posted on Geoportal2 provided a direct link to the electronic land and mortgage registers on the Justice Minister’s website. Thus, users did not even have to enter the number of a land and mortgage register to access the information stored there, including the personal details of the real property owner.