EU Court of Justice Rules in Favor of Transparency in Automated Decision Making
The European Union’s Court of Justice Thursday issued a preliminary ruling that said data subjects are entitled to an explanation of how an automated decision was made. The court sided with an Austrian court's previous ruling that said an automated credit check of a mobile provider customer that didn't offer the customer an explanation of the logic behind its decision, violated the GDPR.
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The court ruled “the controller must describe the procedure and principles actually applied in such a way that the data subject can understand which of his or her personal data have been used, and how they have been used, in the automated decision-making,” said a press release from the Court of Justice.
In the case, a mobile phone operator in Austria prohibited a customer from ending a contract, saying the customer had insufficient credit standing, the court said. The customer’s credit standing was determined by automated means, but the Austrian court ruled that since the customer was not provided information about how the automated decision was reached, the company was in violation of the GDPR.
The EU Court of Justice agreed. "In order to meet the requirements of transparency and intelligibility, it could in particular be appropriate to inform the data subject of the extent to which a variation in the personal data taken into account would have led to a different result,” the Court of Justice said.