Can you publish a court ruling with the national ID visible? An AEPD case

Court rulings and other decisions may contain names, national IDs, addresses, financial data, medical information and references to personal circumstances. Legal interest doesn't mean a ruling can be republished on the internet with every identifier visible.

Decision A/00040/2011 of the Spanish Data Protection Agency analysed a case where a national ID number included in a ruling could be found via Google.

The case: a ruling indexed by ID number

A person found that searching their national ID on Google returned a link to a publication of the Revista Jurídica Militar, published by PYB Enterprises. The content reproduced information from a ruling and kept the identifier visible.

The company explained the article had been transcribed as received. After the complaint it replaced the name and number with neutral characters, reviewed other content, changed access settings and requested that search engines remove the earlier URLs.

What did the AEPD decide?

The AEPD found that personal data had been published online without anonymising the national ID. Even though the entity took corrective measures and the data was no longer discoverable, the Agency issued a warning for the breach committed.

The procedure was resolved under Organic Law 15/1999. Its reasoning shouldn't be transposed mechanically to the current framework, but the case remains a practical precedent about the risk of republishing rulings without creating an anonymised copy.

Official source: Decision A/00040/2011.

A public ruling doesn't turn the national ID into free-to-share data

There may be legitimate purposes to report on a ruling or add it to a legal database. However, the full national ID is generally not needed to achieve those purposes.

Where personal data can hide

• Heading and list of parties.
• Statement of facts.
• Legal grounds and transcripts of evidence.
• Judgment and service formalities.
• Headers, footers and verification codes.
• Annexes, reports, payslips or medical documents incorporated.
• Electronic signatures, QR codes and visible metadata.

How to prepare a ruling for publication

1. Keep the original inside the case file and work on a copy.
2. Detect direct identifiers across every page.
3. Check whether the narrative allows indirect identification.
4. Review annexes and incorporated documentation.
5. Generate the final version and check it after signing or combining files.
6. Prevent older versions from remaining accessible or indexed.

How anonimIA helps

anonimIA makes it easy to detect and review personal data in rulings, decisions and case files. Prepare a public version without modifying the original document.