At Value Privacy we hear from real estate companies that they don’t have to worry about data privacy – they manage property. In a recent presentation, we discussed the impact of Utah, Colorado, Virginia and California privacy laws on real estate companies and gave some examples of heavy fines and judgements.
Laws like GDPR give a preview of potential actions and fines in the US and we used this recent judgement as a case study to learn from.
A European company unlawfully processed sensitive data on prospective tenants without a legal basis. The data included personal appearance, skin color, ethnic origin and sexual orientation.
While the company cooperated and tried to mitigate the damage they were still fined €1.9 million.
If the trends we see are applied here, the total cost for the company once other costs are considered – such as legal, management, remediation, increased insurance rates, etc – can start at 3x the judgement cost.
If you are a real estate company, or have a similar risk concern please contact us.
