(7) Controller
2 pending referralsReferral C-205/25 (Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht, 17 Mar 2025) 
Referral C-185/25 (Waldfelber, 7 Mar 2025)
5 preliminary rulings
Judgment of 2 Dec 2025, C-492/23 (Russmedia Digital and Inform Media Press)
Article 5(2) and Articles 24 to 26 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation)must be interpreted as meaning that the operator of an online marketplace, as controller, within the meaning of Article 4(7) of that regulation, of the personal data contained in advertisements published on its online marketplace, is required, before the publication of the advertisements and by means of appropriate technical and organisational measures,– to identify the advertisements that contain sensitive data in terms of Article 9(1) of that regulation,– to verify whether the user advertiser preparing to place such an advertisement is the person whose sensitive data appear in that advertisement and, if this is not the case,– to refuse publication of that advertisement, unless that user advertiser can demonstrate that the data subject has given his or her explicit consent to the data in question being published on that online marketplace, within the meaning of Article 9(2)(a), or that one of the other exceptions provided for in Article 9(2)(b) to (j) is satisfied.
Judgment of 30 Apr 2025, C-332/23 (Inspektorat kam Visshia sadeben savet)
Article 4(7) of Regulation 2016/679 must be interpreted as meaning that a court having jurisdiction to authorise, at the request of another judicial body, disclosure by a bank to that body of data relating to the bank accounts of judges, public prosecutors and investigating magistrates as well as of their family members, cannot be classified as a controller within the meaning of that provision.
Judgment of 30 Apr 2025, C-313/23 (Inspektorat kam Visshia sadeben savet,)
Article 4(7) of Regulation 2016/679 must be interpreted as meaning that a court having jurisdiction to authorise, at the request of another judicial body, disclosure by a bank to that body of data relating to the bank accounts of judges, public prosecutors and investigating magistrates as well as of their family members, cannot be classified as a controller within the meaning of that provision.
Judgment of 27 Feb 2025, C-638/23 (Amt der Tiroler Landesregierung)
Article 4(7) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation) must be interpreted as not precluding national legislation which designates, as controller, an auxiliary administrative entity lacking legal personality and legal capacity of its own, without specifying, in a precise manner, the specific processing operations of personal data for which that entity is responsible or the purpose of those operations in so far as, first, such an entity is able to fulfil, in accordance with that national legislation, the obligations on a controller towards data subjects with respect to the protection of personal data and, second, that national legislation determines, explicitly or at least implicitly, the scope of the processing of personal data for which that entity is responsible.
Judgment of 4 Oct 2024, C-200/23 (Agentsia po vpisvaniyata)
Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation), in particular Article 4(7) and (9) thereof must be interpreted as meaning that the authority responsible for maintaining the commercial register of a Member State which publishes, in that register, the personal data contained in a company’s constitutive instrument, which is subject to compulsory disclosure under Directive 2017/1132 and was transmitted to it in an application for registration of the company concerned in that register, is both a ‘recipient’ of those data and, particularly in so far as it makes them available to the public, a ‘controller’ of those data, within the meaning of that provision, even where that instrument contains personal data not required by that directive or by the law of that Member State.
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