In the judgment being the subject matter of the commentary, the Supreme Administrative Court has addressed the issue of recognizing the numbers of land and mortgage registers as personal data and ended the five-year dispute between the President of the Personal Data Protection Office and the Surveyor General of Poland. The Court stated that in spite of the fact that the number of a land and mortgage register includes only a combination of digits and letters, the interested party that knows it can easily establish given name(s), surname, Personal Number (PESEL), and – to some degree – also the financial situation of a specific natural person disclosed as the owner of the real property. Therefore, the said judgment is of considerable importance in practice, mainly due to the necessity of having a relevant legal grounds for processing of personal data in the form of numbers of land and mortgage registers by the data controller. Furthermore, the position of the Supreme Administrative Court may also have an indirect influence on granting the status of personal information to other information.
Sylwia Zaborska (Mon,) studied this question.