Data Protection Class Action Lawsuit Against Parking Gougers
Last week, on behalf of Artemis Legal Solutions FlexCo, we filed the first data protection class action lawsuits related to a possession disorder trap, totaling EUR 100,480. The Kronenzeitung reported:
1. What happened?
Between March and December 2024, a few of the usual suspects in the warning letter industry terrified hundreds of people with payment demands and threats of lawsuits. Their alleged offense: parking in a not as “private” marked, but all the better video-monitored parking lot of a commercial wasteland next to a children's sports hall. Furthermore, there was no legally required signage for the video surveillance as well as no actual disturbance of possession: the lessee was only the possessor for two of the nine months of the warning letter wave for possession disorder. It was a deliberately set trap in order to be able to send warnings for alleged possession disorders.
It became bizarre when the former lessee contacted me and explained that he had not given authorization for many of the actions and decisions of the warning letter senders.
2. GDPR Violations
As is often the case, this case also involved a whole chain of data protection violations. Not only was the data processing itself inadmissible, it also violated fundamental data protection obligations such as data minimization, transparency and information obligations, and the obligation to conduct a data protection impact assessment. Almost all victims of the gouging were severely affected, many reported fear, insomnia, and feelings of shame.
3. Class Action Lawsuit
And as is often the case, I dealt with numerous individuals who, given the rather low amount of damages, shied away from legal action. The attorney for the opposing side is, of course, is aware of this aversion to lawsuits – it's their business model – and even provocatively asked several times when the lawsuits would finally come. But not this time: a former employee, a data science expert with entrepreneurial ambitions, founded Artemis Legal Solutions FlexCo. This company buys the data protection claims from the affected individuals and sues collectively, initially only for the first ten affected parties, later for numerous other individuals.
Based on German case law, we conservatively estimate the data protection damage claim for all violations at EUR 5,000 per person and lawsuit. The court has already followed us in this calculation method – in another case, the court definitively sentenced ZUPFDI in January 2025 to data protection damages of EUR 4,200.