EU General Data Protection Regulation
Data protection means the protection of personal data. The aim of the EU General Data Protection Regulation is to improve the protection of personal data, increase the transparency of the processing of personal data and give data subjects more ways to manage the processing of their personal data. Another objective of the Data Protection Regulation is to answer questions about data protection brought on by digitalisation and globalisation. The Data Protection Act complements and clarifies the provisions of the Data Protection Regulation.
Click here to read the Data Protection Act (1050/2018)(Link leads to external service)
Data protection in the services of the City of Helsinki
The City of Helsinki collects necessary personal data of the city service customers and other people with dealings with the City in order to take care of their matters.
Personal data is whatever data that can be used to identify a person. Examples of personal data include: name, e-mail address, telephone number, positional information, personal identity code and patient data.
There is always a legal basis for the processing of personal data at the City of Helsinki. In the processing and archiving of personal data, the City also complies with data processing practices as well as national data security instructions and good practices. Personal data is processed with care and to its purpose. The personnel of the City is regularly trained for processing personal data. The processing of personal data is monitored and the use of systems that include personal data is tracked.
Data protection notices
The City of Helsinki collects personal data to different registers according to the purposes of use. The personal data files have file descriptions from which you can see the purposes of the processing for each file and other useful information, such as the names of the data controller and the contact person for the filing system. Finnish and Swedish are the only official languages of Finland and, as such, most forms are only available in Finnish and Swedish.
Click here to read the City's data protection notices
Your rights and their enforcement
As a data subject, you have rights related to your own personal data and the processing of them at the City of Helsinki. You have, among other things, the right to know whether your personal data are processed at the City and which data are processed and request access to the data about you. You also have the right to demand a rectification of inaccurate personal data.
The rights are enforced in different manners depending on the reason for the processing. A majority of the City's services are based on compliance with a legal obligation. In such cases, the City does not need a separate consent to process your personal data. However, part of the services are of the kind to which personal data are collected based on consent, in which case the City asks for your consent to process your data. You have the right to withdraw that consent at any time.
Click here to read more about your rights and the enforcement of those rights
Cookies policy for the City's services
Cookies and other similar technologies can be used on websites and in other electronic communication services provided by the City of Helsinki to store or use data on the user's device. Detailed information about the cookies used by the services and their purposes is provided directly in each service.
If cookies are used to collect and process personal data, the grounds for processing personal data for non-essential cookies are consent (Data Protection Regulation 6.1 a) and for essential cookies compliance with a statutory obligation (Data Protection Regulation 6.1 c, Section 29 in the Local Government Act, Section 205 in the Act on Electronic Communications Services) as well as public interest and authority (Data Protection Regulation 6.1 e, Section 4 in the Data Protection Act).
Further information
If you would like to know more about the processing of your personal data, please contact the City of Helsinki's Data Protection Officer.
Contact details
Data Protection Officer
City Executive Office
Administration
PO Box 1
00099 City of Helsinki
tietosuoja(a)hel.fi
09 310 1691 (main telephone number)
Send confidential information to the data protection officer using secure email(Link leads to external service). Log in with online banking codes to use secure email.