Estonian Road Administration to start providing parking operators with fine dodgers' data

  • 2019-04-17
  • BNS/TBT Staff

TALLINN – On the basis of a court's judgment from January, the Estonian Road Administration will start providing private parking operators with the personal identification code or registration code of the owners of vehicles that violate parking rules in private parking areas. 

The Road Administration will release data about the owner of the vehicle to a private parking operator if a parking agreement has been entered into, meaning that the parking lot is equipped with relevant signs, a contractual penalty has been agreed upon under the agreement, the agreement has been violated, and the organizer of parking has presented a claim for a contractual penalty after the violation, the claim has not been fulfilled and it has not expired.  

The Road Administration will release the data to a private parking operator if the Road Administration has access to the company's electronic parking information system which contains GPS-tagged, time-stamped photographs with which the violation of parking terms has been proven. Also, the company must employ a data protection specialist who ensures appropriate processing of the data.

To get access to the data, the company must have set forth and published its privacy policy which demonstrates how the company processes data on persons, and the company also possesses a register of operations in the processing of personal data which shows what personal data, on what basis and for what purposes is processed at the company and to whom and on what basis it can be forwarded. 

To the parking operators that meet the aforementioned conditions the Road Administration will release the personal identification code of the owner of the vehicle. In the case of leased vehicles, the personal identification code or registration code of the lessee will be forwarded.

The Tallinn Circuit Court found in a judgment which took effect in January this year that the private parking operator Europark Estonia is entitled to receive from the Estonian Road Administration data on the persons who refuse to pay for parking. 

According to the second-tier court, the goal of Europark in seeking information from the traffic register does not run counter to the purpose for which the traffic register was created -- to keep a record of vehicles, including the owners of vehicles and authorized users.