On 26 August 2021, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) published its Opinion on the European Commission’s Proposal for a Directive on consumer credits, which seeks to modernize and adapt the current framework on consumer credit rules to the increased digitalization and other market trends.
Among others, the EDPS outlines the Proposal’s “clear impact” on data protection rights, especially to what concerns creditworthiness assessment and personalized offers based on automated processing.
However, the EDPS calls for further legislative efforts to enhance protection by specifying the categories and sources of data that should and should not be processed when assessing creditworthiness, as well as by expressly banning the use of any special categories of personal data under Article 9 of the GDPR.
Moreover, the EDPS underlines the consumer’s right to request and obtain human intervention should be ensured in case the creditworthiness assessment relies on profiling or automated individual decision-making.
The press release is available here, and the full text of the opinion is available here.
