The Supreme Court (TS) has confirmed the two-year prison sentence for a crime of violation of secrets imposed on a computer technician from the Valencia City Council who disclosed the personal data of some 8,300 members in a WhatsApp group of school parents. of the polling stations for the April 2019 elections. The high court has rejected the defendant's appeal against the sentence of the Provincial Court of Valencia that convicted him for this dissemination and has confirmed the ruling, against which there is no appeal.
It was the Investigative Court number 17 of Valencia that initiated the procedure against Alfonso GG, an official with the category of senior technical personnel assigned to the information technology service of the Valencia City Council.
“Taking advantage of the fact that due to his job in the City Council's IT department, he had legitimate access” to the file that contained the list of all the members selected to form the electoral tables of the general and regional elections of the Valencian Community that were held. They celebrated on April 28, 2019, the official announced them. Some data that contained the name, surname, ID, address and position of president or member, owner or substitute of the 8,334 people who had been designated to make up those tables.
The accused proceeded to spread it through the WhatsApp messaging network, in a chat of the school parents' group, “beginning a chain diffusion by various users of the application”, totally unrelated to the Valencia City Council and, therefore, “allowing access to the archive to more than a hundred people.”
For this reason, the Provincial Court of Valencia convicted Alfonso GG as the author of a crime of violation of secrets, punishable by two years in prison and special disqualification from exercising the right to passive suffrage during the time of the sentence. He also sentenced him to a 12-month fine of 10 euros per day, which represents a total of 3,600 euros, and suspension from employment or public office for a period of one year.
In his appeal to the Supreme Court, the convicted man requested acquittal and claimed that he was unaware that the action carried out was a crime. However, the Supreme Court recalls that the accused was an official of the Valencia City Council, with a degree in computer engineering and that he had received specific training in data protection. Therefore, as confirmed by a witness at trial, he knew the measures that had to be taken to protect that data.
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In this way, the Supreme Court explains that “data of more than 8,000 people were published that included very relevant personal information (name, ID and address), they were disclosed in a network whose propagation can be massive and, due to the nature of the data, an objective risk was created that they could be used by third parties for criminal purposes.”
Therefore, the facts that are the subject of the accusation have been correctly subsumed in the crime defined in article 417 of the Penal Code. In short, this data was disseminated through a social network with the risk of impersonation, scams and location of these people in their respective homes, as well as at the polling stations.
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