Bostadsförmedlingen’s Privacy Policy for Housing Applicants

Bostadsförmedlingen i Stockholm AB (“we”) care about your privacy and seek to ensure a high level of data protection. This policy explains how we collect and use your personal information. It also describes your rights and how you can exercise them. This information applies to anyone registered in Bostadsförmedlingen’s housing queue, who is a co-applicant of a main applicant in Bostadsförmedlingen’s housing queue, or is registered in the internal queue of Stockholm’s municipal housing companies. It is also aimed at anyone who registers their interest in a new development project or who receives information from us.

It is important that you read and understand the policy and feel confident about how we process your personal data. If you have any questions, you are always welcome to contact us.

What is personal data and what is processing of personal data?

Personal data is any type of information that can be linked, directly or indirectly, to a living natural person. Processing of personal data is everything that happens to the personal data. Any operation performed on personal data, whether or not by automated means, constitutes processing. Examples of common processing operations include collection, recording, organisation, structuring, storage, adaptation, transmission and erasure.

Who is responsible for the personal data that we collect?

Bostadsförmedlingen i Stockholm AB, corporate ID number 556057-8303, with the address Palmfeltsvägen 5, SE-121 07 Stockholm-Globen, Sweden, is the data controller for the company’s processing of personal data.

What personal data do we collect about customers and co-applicants?

We collect and process the following customer data: name, personal ID number, phone number, address, e-mail address, information about employment and financial circumstances, household size and housing preferences, information about your studies, information that you provide when contacting our customer service team, and additional information that may be provided by you in connection with your profile, applications and other communication with us (your “personal data”).

For co-applicants not personally registered in the housing queue, we collect and process the following data: name, personal ID number, contact details, the name of the main applicant, and financial circumstances.

Personal data may be obtained from you personally, from SPAR (the Swedish state personal address register), and from credit-rating agencies.

How do we process personal ID numbers?

We will only process your personal ID number when there is a clear purpose for doing so, when it is necessary to establish identification, or when it is necessary for another important reason.

Why do we process data and why are we entitled to process your data?

Public interest and contracts

We will process your personal data in order to manage the housing queue and to allocate housing to the queue and to the internal queue of Stockholm’s municipal housing companies. In order to manage the housing queue and allocate housing to you, we require your contact details, such as name, address, e-mail address and phone number. When you are offered an apartment, we require information about employment, household size and financial circumstances. We also require information about household members, if any. If you are offered student accommodation, we require information about your studies. This is to be able to determine whether you meet the landlord’s rental conditions. Your personal data is processed as outlined above to enable us to carry out our municipal task (housing allocation) and fulfil our contract with you.

Consent for processing special categories of personal data

If you are applying for priority status for an apartment or senior housing through Micasa Fastigheter, you may provide so-called special categories of data (for example, information about a medical condition or disability) in your application. In such cases, this data will also be processed by us in order to determine whether or not you are entitled to priority status for an apartment or senior housing. Such processing is based on you giving your consent. For more information on priority status for housing, see bostad.stockholm.se/sa-gar-det-till/sarskilda-behov/. For more information on senior housing through Micasa, see https://bostad.stockholm.se/sa-gar-det-till/boendetyper/seniorbostad/micasas-seniorbostader/.

You can withdraw your consent at any time. Please note, however, that this does not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal, and that the data may need to be saved for archiving purposes, see below under For how long is your data saved?

Balancing of interests

Co-applicant

For co-applicants not personally registered in the housing queue, we process your personal data based on a balancing of interests. You provide us with your data in order to, together with the main applicant, fulfil the landlord’s income conditions and be allocated a rental apartment.

New development projects

We will also process your personal data in order to communicate with you if you have registered your interest in a new development project. If you wish to keep up to date with future development projects, we require a name and an e-mail address to be able to notify you of the date on which allocation begins for the project you are interested in. The processing of your personal data for this purpose is based on a balancing of interests.

Customer service

We will also process your personal data when you send an e-mail to our customer service team. If your e-mail contains personal data, we will normally only use this to answer your questions. If your e-mail concerns an ongoing matter, we may use the personal data to handle the matter. To provide you with a complete service when you have questions, we record all contact with you in our register. The processing of your personal data in order to answer your questions and provide you with a service is based on a balancing of interests.

Newsletters, information mailings and customer surveys

We may also process your personal data, such as name and e-mail address, in order to send you newsletters containing relevant information about Bostadsförmedlingen’s activities and services, for as long as a customer relationship exists between you and Bostadsförmedlingen. We may also send you customer surveys in order to analyse and develop our services and working practices. Our processing of personal data in order to send you information, news and customer surveys is based on a balancing of interests.

If you no longer wish to receive information or news from us, you can easily opt out of continued processing for this purpose by logging into My Pages and changing your notification and communication preferences.

Mailings to 18-year-olds

We also process the name and home address of persons who live in Stockholm County and will soon be turning 18. We purchase this data from SPAR in order to provide information about being able to join the housing queue from the age of 18 years. This mailing is sent out each quarter and the data is erased once it has been sent.

Who might we disclose your personal data to?

We share your personal data with the suppliers and partners we work with, who perform services on our behalf. These companies sometimes act as so-called data processors for us. A data processor is a company that processes the information on our behalf and in accordance with our instructions.

Your personal data will mainly be shared with:

Companies that help us with payment processing, such as banks.
Companies that send out information and payment advice slips (printing and/or distribution).
Companies that help us with archiving.
Companies that conduct customer surveys, for example customer satisfaction surveys, on our behalf.
IT service providers (essential operation, technical support and maintenance of our IT solutions).
Landlords if you are offered an apartment or invited to view an apartment.

When your personal data is shared with data processors, this is done solely for purposes that are compatible with the purposes for which we collected the information. We have written agreements in place with all our data processors, under which they guarantee the security of the data being processed and undertake to comply with our security requirements.

Public access and secrecy

Bostadsförmedlingen is a municipal company and is subject to the principle of public access to official documents. This means that all personal data that you provide to us or that we collect from someone else is, as a general rule, public. This in turn means that we have an obligation to disclose personal data if anyone requests access to documents where the data is located. The exception is if the personal data or document is covered by secrecy in accordance with the Swedish Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act (OSL) (2009:400). Secrecy provisions that may be considered for Bostadsförmedlingen’s activities concern data about the personal circumstances of an individual in matters involving municipal housing agencies (ch. 26, § 11 of OSL) and disclosure in contravention of the General Data Protection Regulation or the Swedish Data Protection Act (ch. 21, § 7 of OSL).

Where do we process your personal data?

All your personal data is processed in Sweden.

For how long is your data saved?

Your data is saved in our active register for as long as you are registered in the housing queue. As we are a public company, we are governed by the principle of public access to official documents and the Swedish Archives Act and are required under these to save your data for the purpose of archiving official documents. In some cases, we have a so-called legal obligation to retain data for longer than necessary for the purpose for which it was originally collected. This processing is carried out by virtue of the Archives Act.

If you have registered an interest in a new development project, your data is erased for this purpose three months after the completion of the allocation process for the project.

Data used to send information to persons turning 18 years of age is erased after the information is sent.

How is your personal data protected?

We only process personal data that we consider necessary to conduct our business and only for as long as is needed for the specific purpose. Only persons within the organisation who actually need access to the data have access.

The security of our IT infrastructure is regularly assessed by independent parties to ensure that your information is always handled and accessed in a controlled manner.

What are your rights as a data subject?

Right of access (so-called register extracts)

We are always open and transparent about how we process your personal data. If you wish to know what data we process about you specifically, you can request access to it. You can do this by e-mailing your customer number or personal ID number to dataskyddsombud@bostad.stockholm.se.

Right to rectification

You can ask to have your personal data corrected if the data is incorrect. Taking into account the stated purpose, you are also entitled to have any incomplete personal data completed. Remember that if you are registered in the housing queue, you can amend certain data directly through My Pages.

Right to erasure

You can ask to have the personal data we process about you erased if the data is no longer necessary for the purposes for which it was collected or processed. However, we may need to save it for archiving purposes.

Right to restriction

Information mailings: You can opt out of your personal data being processed for the purpose of sending newsletters. To do this, log into My Pages.

Participation in customer surveys: You are entitled to opt out of being sent various customer surveys. The surveys we carry out are designed to enable us to improve our service and find out more about how people want to live. You can opt out of surveys in My Pages.

Right to data portability

You can ask us to provide your data in a machine-readable format to another data controller, for example another party or supplier. This only applies to personal data that you have provided us with, which is processed by automated means and which we process to fulfil a contract we have made with you or based on your consent.

What is meant by the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection being a supervisory authority?

The Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten) is responsible for monitoring compliance with the relevant legislation. If you think that your personal data is being incorrectly processed by us, you are entitled to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority, which in this case is the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection.

How to contact us if you have questions about data protection

If you have questions or want to exercise your rights in relation to our personal data processing, please contact dataskyddsombud@bostad.stockholm.se

We may amend our privacy policy. The most recent version of the policy is available on this page.

This privacy policy was last updated on 5 April 2023.