A few days ago, the Federal Administration for Geodetic and Property Legal Affairs (FGU) announced on its website that data from the real estate price register and cadastral data were being downloaded and used without authorization.
More specifically, they claim that it is a phenomenon that has become the subject of serious institutional concern – the unauthorized download, combination and commercial use of Real Estate Price Register (RCN) data and cadastral data protected by a special legal regime.
They claim that certain private internet platforms are responsible for abuses, without specifying which platforms they are.
They assure that they do not seek to limit the freedom of information or, as they stated, the legitimate development of digital services, but to protect citizens, institutions and the real estate market from misinterpretation of the legal status and purpose of the data, which they stated are publicly available with a clearly limited scope and under strictly defined conditions.
A matter of public scrutiny
As they noted, together with the Tax Administration of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (PU FBiH), citizens are provided with public access to a limited set of RCN data for the sake of market transparency and general information, while protecting personal and tax data.
The legal framework for this, they add, was established by the Regulation on the database of the FBiH Real Estate Register, Article 14 of which stipulates that data from the real estate market records are public, except for those that are considered personal data.
In this sense, as they reasoned, the aforementioned provision expressly refers to the Personal Data Protection Act, which replaced the previously valid law, according to which such data is treated in a special legal regime.
Public inspection, however, does not represent, as they claim, the release of data in any legal or technical sense. They explained in more detail what is meant by the aforementioned.
“The data are not available for mass download, redistribution or commercial use. There is no prescribed tariff or delivery regime for them, precisely because they are not issued as such. Any other presentation of their status is misleading,” they pointed out.
They pointed out that the portal katastar.ba unequivocally confirms this previously.
“The displayed data may not be used for business and commercial purposes or given to third parties. Random and indiscriminate searching and downloading of data is prohibited,” emphasized the FGU.
They also noted that all publicly available data is for informational purposes only and cannot serve as a public document.
About the contract price
They pointed out that the data displayed in public view reflect the situation as it is in individual sales contracts.
“This means that we are talking about reported transactions, without expert verification, without methodological control and without statistical processing. Only the official reports of the Administration are a credible representation of the state of the real estate market, because in them the data goes through all the mentioned stages of processing and only then are published in the form of expert analyses,” they add.
Any market analysis based on, as they stated, unauthorized data from RCN can be wrong and mislead the public, regardless of the sophistication of the visualization with which it is presented.
They emphasized that they found that certain platforms not only download data from the RCN without authorization, but also combine them with cadastral data – parcels, which you indicated are subject to a completely separate and strict legal regime.
The real estate locations shown on the RCN map, as they said, are intentionally approximate and not exact, precisely for the purpose of protecting personal data and preventing the identification of owners and taxpayers.
“By combining these intentionally imprecise data with cadastral parcels and addresses, internet platforms artificially reconstruct precision, which the Administration knowingly did not provide. The result is the indirect identification of natural persons, which is a serious violation of regulations on the protection of personal data and a direct security risk for citizens,” they claim.
They reiterated that the cadastral data, which are used in the process, are subject to a special legal framework, which they stated is extremely clear.
“The Law on Real Estate Survey and Cadastre expressly stipulates that legal entities and natural persons may not give third parties or use real estate survey and cadastre data for their own purposes, without the special approval of the competent authority, and that such data may not be given to other authorities, organizations and citizens”, they add.
Referring to the provisions published on the katastar.ba portal, they indicated that a fee is payable for the use of survey data, real estate cadastre and land cadastre.
They claim that the aforementioned provision derives from the Law on fees for the use of data and the provision of services in the field of real estate surveys and cadastres, as well as from the Decision on fees for the use of survey and cadastre data.
Geodetic documentation can, they continue, be used only for the purposes for which it was issued, and they, as the Administration, keep prescribed records of every provision of data for use (to whom, when and which data were given).
Downloading and redistribution of cadastral data without approval, regardless of how they were technically obtained, represents, they claim, a direct violation of all the aforementioned regulations, as well as the provisions of the Ordinance on the Real Estate Cadastre Database (BPKN).
The border between what is allowed and what is not allowed
They also assure that they do not question the legitimacy of digital services in the real estate market.
“Portals for real estate advertising operate legally, and ad analytics and trend monitoring based on publicly published prices is a common practice. Blogs and media analysis of the market based on publicly available information are completely acceptable. It is part of the functioning of the free market of information,” they add.
However, the use of RCN public inspection data as a market base for real estate valuation, banking analysis, investment decisions or commercial software products, as they emphasized, is not a standard practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina and is not accidental.
“It is not only a misinterpretation of data, but also unauthorized secondary processing in the context of the Personal Data Protection Act, potential liability for damages caused by wrong conclusions, and a direct violation of the Regulation on the database of the FBiH Real Estate Registry,” warned the FGU.
When cadastral data, the use of which is regulated by a special legal framework and tariff, is also integrated into the same product, the legal exposure becomes, as they stated, multiple and serious.
In particular, they warned that automated data collection (scraping), compilation, merging of databases and the creation of commercial analyzes based on publicly available data represent unauthorized secondary processing and a violation of applicable regulations.
For FGU, such activities cannot be justified by referring to the public availability of data or to the technical means by which they were collected.
Warning and announcement of further measures
They announced that they will take all available legal measures, including reports to competent inspection and other authorities, against entities that download data without authorization, misrepresent their legal status or use them for commercial and professional purposes, contrary to the aforementioned regulations.
The FGU said that this announcement is also a formal warning to all entities that are considering or already carrying out similar activities, it says Klix.
