Fine imposed on the company Dialcom and on the cooperative society Kiryat Haim

In the first case, ILITA's inspectors found that Dialcom Company Ltd, which provides automatic dialing services to various bodies. The company made use of the National and Local Voters Register, which it received while providing services to parties and candidates in the local authorities elections, in order to conduct data cleansing in its own database, and to reuse the information for its other customers, all of which are in clear violation of the Protection of Privacy Law and the Elections Law. Furthermore, the application for database registration filed by the company included false information regarding its data sources.

The Databases Registrar, who's powers are part of ILITA's responsibilities, decided to deny the registration application and to ban Dialcom from any use of its database and to destroy all copies of it. In addition, administrative fines were imposed on Dialcom in the amount of 4000 NIS for two violations: the use of the Voters Register for a purpose other than the one for which the Register was provided (Section 8(b) to the Protection of Privacy Law) and the other for providing false information in the registration application (Section 9 of the Law).

In another case, ILITA has imposed an administrative fine in the amount of 3000 NIS on the cooperative society Kiryat Haim for breach of section 8(b) of the Protection of Privacy Law. The cooperative used the Haifa Municipality Voters Register in order to update the list of its members of the cooperative society. The list taken from the Voters Register also included information of the voters political affiliation.

In this case, the cooperative tried to argue that since the Register was printed on paper, it does not violate the law. ILITA's position clarified that even if the information used is derived from the original database in a way that does not create a database in itself, the use is still limited to the purpose "for which the database was established".  

Adv. Yoram Hacohen, head of ILITA and Databases Registrar: "the case of Dialcom highlights the problematic nature of outsourcing privacy protected information. In both cases the "purpose limitation" principle - the duty to use the information solely for the purpose for which it was accepted, a basic principle of privacy protection - was violated. We will continue developing the use of the economic sanctions tools on whomever makes illegal use of personal information, as this is the most effective tool for handling this phenomenon".