- The school had obtained consent from the pupills and each one of the pupills could opt out at any time. The Swedish Data Protection Agency (DPA) did however find that due to the power balance of a school vs a pupill, these consents are not ”freely given”, and thus are void. The school therefor have no legal basis of processing special categories of data/sensitive data, which processing face recognition data (”biometric information”) for identification purposes is. Violation of GDPR Article 9.
- The school had not completed a sufficient Data Protection Impact Assesment which properly identified risks of this processing. In addition, due to the nature of this processing, they would have been obliged to consult with the DPA about this impact assessment before starting. Violation of GDPR Article 35&36.
- The DPA also found that the processing was more extensive than necessary, since attendance could be taken in less invasive ways. This a violation of GDPR article 5.1c (the data minimisation principle).
I hope the decision will be appealed by the school, which is run by the municipality. There are several interesting questions, such as if consent can be freely given in schools, if the data minimization principle was really breached (the school claimed this way of taking attendance saves a calculated 72,000h of teachers time per year in just this school), etc. I am not sure however that the municipality has the right resources and competency to make a competent appeal.