Estonia’s Interior Ministry publishes deceased persons’ data openly — ERR News
Since mid-September, Estonia’s Ministry of the Interior has been publishing an openly accessible table containing the personal data of people who died over the past 100 years. The dataset includes personal identification codes, names, and dates of birth and death of people born from 1926 onward, ERR News reports.
The information is posted on the andmed.eesti.ee platform and updated daily. Death data are published seven days after they are entered in the Population Register, meaning at least seven days after a person’s death.
Updating organizations’ data
Enel Pungas, head of the Estonian Interior Ministry’s Population Operations Unit, said that death information had been available previously, but could only be obtained through individual requests. The machine-readable file, she said, enables organizations to update information about their members or clients more quickly, including terminating contracts after a person’s death.
According to Pungas, this should also reduce the burden on relatives of deceased people, who may, for example, need to confirm a death to cancel a newspaper subscription or an electricity supply contract.
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Delay and privacy protection
The ministry said it conducted a data protection impact assessment and identified potential risks before launching the open dataset. Among them is the possibility that a relative or another close person may learn about a death through the open data.
According to Pungas, the seven-day delay is intended to reduce this risk and allow time to correct information about the death of a living person that was entered into the Population Register by mistake before it is made public. Statistics Estonia and the National Institute for Health Development have also limited the level of detail in cause-of-death statistics to prevent people from being identified by matching datasets.
After a death is registered, no new contract can be concluded using the deceased person’s personal identification code, the Interior Ministry noted. An identity document is also required to conclude a contract; once death information is entered into the Population Register, such documents are declared invalid.
The Estonian Data Protection Inspectorate stressed that before data on deceased people are published, it should be assessed whether this could harm the interests of their relatives or violate their privacy. Last autumn, the inspectorate drew the Interior Ministry’s attention to the need to conduct such an assessment.
