Car dealership ignores customer’s request to delete personal information
Early resolved case summary #8
Lessons Learned
- Personal information that is no longer required to fulfil the identified purposes should be destroyed, erased, or made anonymous.
- An individual may withdraw consent for the collection, use or disclosure of their personal information at any time, subject to legal or contractual restrictions and reasonable notice.
Complaint summary
During a legal dispute between an automobile dealership and a recent customer, the customer had become aware of the personal information that the dealership held about him. The customer then asked the dealership in writing to delete all his personal information, including his social insurance number, driver’s licence number and all financial information from his credit application.
The dealership did not reply to any of his several requests for deletion, so the customer appealed to our Office to resolve the situation.
Outcome
When our Office contacted the dealership, we learned that it had already taken steps to comply with the complainant’s request. It had retrieved the complainant's file through its lawyer and contracted a document destruction company to destroy the documentation at the dealership’s office. The document destruction company recorded a video of the destruction and provided the dealership with a certificate of destruction. The dealership then sent a copy of the video to the customer.
After the complainant confirmed that he had seen the video and that he was ultimately satisfied, we closed his complaint.
September 2014
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