Administrative fines imposed by French Data Protection Authority on COSMOSPACE and TELEMAQUE for the infringement of the legal provisions stipulated in GDPR

The National Center for the Protection of Personal Data (NCPDP), for information and enforcement purposes, communicates about the administrative fines of on COSMOSPACE – 250 000 euro and on TELEMAQUE – 150 000 euro, imposed by the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) for violation of Article 5 Principles relating to processing of personal data and Article 9 Processing of special categories of personal data of the GDPR.

COSMOSPACE and TELEMAQUE provide remote clairvoyance services, one by telephone and the other by online chat and text messages. Inspections carried out by the CNIL in 2021 revealed several breaches, including the collection of sensitive data without prior explicit consent (in particular health data and data relating to sexual orientation), the retention of data for an excessive period, the sending of commercial prospection communications to people who had not given their consent and, in the case of COSMOSPACE, systematic recording of telephone calls. 

In this context, CNIL imposed a fine of €250,000 on COSMOSPACE and a fine of €150,000 on TELEMAQUE. These fines were adopted in cooperation with about fifteen European counterparts of the CNIL in both cases. The amounts of these fines were decided on the basis of the seriousness of the breaches, the number of people concerned – the database shared by the two companies containing the data of more than 1.5 million people – and the sensitivity of the data processed. The financial situations of the companies and their structures were also taken into account, in order to set dissuasive but proportionate fines.

The NCPDP, as the national supervisory authority for the processing of personal data, emphasizes the responsibility of personal data controllers to comply with the provisions of the legal framework for the protection of personal data and to ensure that personal data processing operations comply with the legislation in force.