A German court has handed consumer advocates a significant defeat in a long-running fight over loyalty apps, ruling that handing over personal data is not a 'price' that companies must disclose under consumer law.
The case, decided by the Cologne Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht Köln), concerned the Penny discount chain's customer app, which offers registered shoppers instant discounts, coupons and voucher promotions. Scanning the loyalty code at the till stores the receipt, and Penny analyses shopping behaviour to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and prize draws and to evaluate its range statistically.
The Federation of German Consumer Organisations (vzbv) argued that customers must be informed explicitly that their data constitutes consideration when it is processed for purposes beyond the performance of the contract itself, and that failing to present that as part of a total price breaches the legal duty to state the total price in distance contracts under the German Civil Code.
The court disagreed (case 6 UKl 3/25). It accepted that consumer rules for distance contracts apply in principle to contracts in which consumers provide personal data. But the duty to state a total price, the 6th Civil Senate held, requires a calculable quantity — and data is not that. Price, in European and German law, is essentially defined as a monetary amount or a digital unit of value. Data may be an economic consideration; legally it is not a price within the rules on price disclosure and consumer protection.
Nor, the judges said, is there a protection gap. How transparently a company must inform people about the collection and use of personal data is already comprehensively regulated by the GDPR, whose information duties require firms to disclose the purpose, recipients and framework of processing in clear and plain language. Extending consumer-law price definitions to cover data would be neither foreseen by the legislature nor appropriate.
The decision follows a similar ruling by the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court in a parallel case involving Lidl's 'Plus' app. To ensure uniform application of the law, the Cologne court allowed an appeal to the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof), which will now have the final word on how paying with data sits at the intersection of consumer protection and data protection law.
Consumer advice centres have warned for years that loyalty apps make users transparent for the sake of small savings. The ruling does not change what companies must disclose under the GDPR; it says only that the price-tag metaphor does not translate into German consumer law.
