Employees may have a claim against their employers for access to
information about all personal data processed by the employers
pursuant to Article 15 (3), Sentence 1, of Regulation (EU) 2016/679
(General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)). Under the GDPR,
employees have a right to access, among other things, information
about the purposes of personal data processing, the recipients of
the data processed, and the storage period relevant to the data. In
accordance with the GDPR, an employer must also provide employees
with copies of the data that the employer processed.
Until recently, the scope of the GDPR's right to information
and the right to receive data copies had not been clarified by
German case law. In particular, the scope of data copy requests had
caused major problems in practice, especially in the context of
employment relationships. Almost all documents created, processed,
and stored in the context of an employment relationship contain
personal data.
