Contract refused - but why?
Imagine you want to take out a new cell phone or electricity contract - and suddenly you're told: Application rejected. No late payments, no debts. And still no contract. The reason? Your credit rating - in other words, your alleged creditworthiness. In Austria, this is often calculated by the credit reference agency CRIF. But what sounds like objective figures now turns out to be a data puzzle with lots of question marks.
The data protection organization Noyb, led by Max Schrems, now wants to take action against CRIF with a class action lawsuit. The suspicion: millions of people in Austria may have been rated lower on the basis of questionable data - with real consequences for their daily lives.
Voodoo score instead of facts?
What the data protection experts have uncovered is explosive: many of the scores assigned by CRIF are allegedly not based on specific payment experience, but on socio-demographic data - such as place of residence, age or gender. In 90 percent of cases, according to Schrems, no data on previous payment behavior is available. Despite this, ratings are still being made.
Particularly explosive: tests by Noyb show that simply entering a different delivery address when shopping online can suddenly improve - or worsen - your credit rating. Schrems calls this "data voodoo". Dietrich Mateschitz, the richest Austrian during his lifetime, was also classified as having below-average creditworthiness according to CRIF. Why? Probably because of address confusion. No joke.
DSGVO? We don't know it.
Another accusation: much of the data is likely to have been used without explicit consent - actually collected for marketing, but now used for credit assessments. In Noyb's view, this is a clear violation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Although CRIF claims that it no longer uses such data for evaluation purposes, it did so before October 2023. And this is exactly where the planned lawsuit comes in.
According to CRIF, it obtains its information from a wide variety of sources: Contractual partners, population registers, insolvency lists - and its own subsidiaries. Who really knows what is stored about them? Hardly anyone. And according to Schrems, anyone who wants to be deleted even risks being automatically rated lower in the future. No entry also means no trust.
The biggest lawsuit in the Republic?
Noyb is now calling for data donations. Anyone who requests their own credit rating can help to expose the system. Together with the University of Bremen, they want to compare the scores with real income ratios. If the suspicions are confirmed, Noyb intends to file an association lawsuit against CRIF. Up to 6 million people could be affected - and damages of up to 750 euros per person are possible.
Who knows nothing, should pay everything?
When millions of people are excluded from mobile phone contracts or discriminated against when shopping online on the basis of their home address and date of birth, then something is seriously wrong.
Transparency? Not a chance. Consent? Obviously not available. And when the system also fails the richest Austrian, it shows one thing: the evaluation is not a science, but a guessing game with serious consequences.
If "data voodoo" determines your creditworthiness, it's high time to lift the veil - if necessary with the largest class action lawsuit in Germany.
