Overview
- Investigative reporting published on July 15 revealed that Schufa keeps a largely unknown 'historical' database holding outdated, sensitive records for millions of people.
- The archive reportedly contains old loans, credit cards, seizures, personal insolvencies and debts that consumers believed had been deleted and is used to run backdated tests of new credit scores.
- Schufa says the storage and testing are lawful, limited to test purposes and based on multiple legal grounds, and that test results are deleted after use.
- Only a few companies — a bank, a payments provider and an energy firm — admitted using the historical data while many others declined to answer, and consumers are not told these records exist or appear in routine data copies.
- Privacy lawyers and consumer groups argue the practice likely conflicts with GDPR rules on erasure, purpose limitation and data minimization, and the Hessian State Data Protection Officer has an open review that began in spring 2025.