Privacy policy for clients

1. who is responsible, who can you contact?

I, the notary, am responsible for the processing of your personal data. You can contact me or my data protection officer via the notary's office for all data protection inquiries. All contact options can be found on this website under "Contact" or "Imprint".

2. what data do I process and where does the data come from?

I process personal data that I receive from you or from third parties commissioned by you (e.g. lawyer, tax consultant, estate agent, bank), such as

  • Personal data, e.g. first name and surname, date and place of birth, nationality, marital status; in individual cases your birth register number;
  • Contact data, such as postal address, telephone and fax numbers, e-mail address;
  • your tax identification number for real estate contracts;
  • in certain cases, e.g. marriage contracts, wills, inheritance contracts or adoptions, also data on your family situation and your assets and, if applicable, information on your health or other sensitive data, e.g. because this serves to document your legal capacity;
  • in certain cases also data from your legal relationships with third parties, such as file numbers or loan or account numbers at credit institutions.

I also process data from public registers, e.g. land registers, commercial registers and registers of associations.

3. for what purposes and on what legal basis is the data processed?

As a notary, I am the holder of a public office. My official duties are carried out in the performance of a task which is in the public interest in the orderly and preventive administration of justice and thus in the public interest, and in the exercise of official authority (Art. 6 para. 1 sentence 1 letter e of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)).
Your data will be processed exclusively in order to carry out the notarial activity requested by you and any other persons involved in a transaction in accordance with my official duties, i.e. for the preparation of draft deeds, for the notarization and execution of deed transactions or for the provision of advice. The processing of personal data is therefore only ever carried out on the basis of the professional and procedural provisions applicable to me, which are essentially derived from the Federal Notarial Code and the Notarization Act. These provisions also result in the legal obligation for me to process the required data (Art. 6 para. 1 sentence 1 letter c GDPR). Failure to provide the data requested from you would therefore mean that I would have to refuse to (further) carry out the official transaction.

4. to whom do I pass on data?

As a notary, I am subject to a statutory duty of confidentiality. This duty of confidentiality also applies to all my employees and other persons commissioned by me.
I may therefore only pass on your data if and insofar as I am obliged to do so in individual cases, e.g. due to notification obligations to the tax authorities, or to public registers such as the land registry, commercial or association registers, the central register of wills, registers of precautionary measures, courts such as probate, care or family courts or authorities. In the context of professional and official supervision, I may also be obliged to provide information to the Chamber of Notaries or my supervisory authority, which in turn are subject to an official duty of confidentiality.
Otherwise, your data will only be passed on if I am obliged to do so on the basis of declarations made by you or if you have requested the transfer.

Communication by e-mail (e.g. answering inquiries, sending drafts) is possible. Outgoing e-mails are sent with transport encryption ("Start-TLS"), which protects the content of the e-mail from unauthorized access by third parties during the transmission process from our mail server to the mail server of your e-mail provider. Please note that transport encryption can only be used if the server used by your email provider supports it.

Transport encryption only affects the transmission process and does not protect the content of the email from access to the mail servers. This means that unauthorized access by the email provider or a third party who has gained access to the mail servers is possible. End-to-end encryption to prevent this is not offered. Furthermore, it cannot be ruled out that the transport encryption is decrypted and that the content of the e-mail is accessed during the transmission process. You therefore have the option of objecting to e-mail communication. In this case, communication will be made in writing by post.

5. is data transferred to third countries?

Your personal data will only be transferred to third countries at your special request or if and insofar as a party to the deed is domiciled in a third country.

6 How long will your data be stored?

I process and store your personal data within the scope of my statutory retention obligations.
According to § 50 of the Ordinance on the Keeping of Notarial Files and Directories (NotAktVV), the following retention periods apply to the retention of notarial documents:

  • Entries in the register of deeds, documents held in the collection of inheritance contracts, documents held in the special collection, documents held in the electronic collection of deeds: 100 years,
  • Entries in the custody register, documents held in the collection of deeds and documents held in the general file: 30 years,
  • documents kept in the ancillary file: 7 years (the notary may stipulate a longer retention period of a maximum of 30 years in writing in accordance with § 52 Para. 2 NotAktVV, e.g. in the case of dispositions upon death or in the event of a risk of recourse; the stipulation may also be made in general for individual types of legal transactions, e.g. for dispositions upon death).

After expiry of the storage periods, your data will be deleted or the paper documents destroyed (Section 35 (6) sentence 2 of the Federal Notarial Code), unless I am obliged to store them for a longer period of time in accordance with Article 6 (1) sentence 1 letter c GDPR due to tax and commercial law storage and documentation obligations (from the German Commercial Code, Criminal Code, Money Laundering Act or the Tax Code) as well as professional regulations for the purpose of conflict of laws checks.

7 What rights do you have?

You have the right:

  • to request information about whether I process personal data about you, if so, for what purposes I process the data and which categories of personal data I process, to whom the data may have been forwarded, how long the data may be stored and what rights you are entitled to.
  • to have inaccurate personal data concerning you that is stored by me corrected. You also have the right to have an incomplete data record stored by me completed.
  • to demand the deletion of personal data concerning you, provided that there is a legal reason for deletion (see Art. 17 GDPR) and the processing of your data is not required to fulfill a legal obligation or for other overriding reasons within the meaning of the GDPR.
  • to demand that I only process your data to a limited extent, e.g. to assert legal claims or for reasons of important public interest, while I check your right to rectification or objection, for example, or if I reject your right to erasure (cf. Art. 18 GDPR).
  • to object to the processing if this is necessary for me to perform my duties in the public interest or to exercise my public office, if there are reasons for the objection arising from your particular situation.
  • to contact the supervisory authorities with a data protection complaint. The competent supervisory authority for Bavarian notaries is the Bavarian State Commissioner for Data Protection, Wagmüllerstraße 18, 80538 Munich. The competent authority for notaries in Rhineland-Palatinate is the State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Rhineland-Palatinate, Postfach 30 40, 55020 Mainz.

To exercise your rights and if you have any questions or complaints regarding the use of your personal data, you and the other persons concerned can contact my data protection officer in confidence at any time via the notary's office.