This Decision lays down the functions, rights and obligations of the IMI actors and IMI users referred to in Article 6 in relation to data protection requirements with regard to the operation of the Internal Market Information System, hereinafter ‘IMI’.

The competent authorities of the Member States shall exchange and further process personal data only for the purposes defined in the relevant Community acts as set out in the Annex, on the basis of which the information is exchanged, hereinafter ‘the relevant Community acts’.

Requests for information from the competent authorities of one Member State to another and the replies thereto shall be based on the multilingual questions and the data fields defined for the purposes of IMI and drawn up by the Commission in cooperation with the Member States.

The responsibilities of the controller under Article 2(d) of Directive 95/46/EC and Article 2(d) of Regulation (EC) No 45/2001 shall be jointly exercised by the IMI actors pursuant to Article 6 in accordance with their respective responsibilities within IMI.

The controllers shall ensure that the data subject may effectively exercise its rights to information, to access, to rectify and to object according to the applicable data protection legislation. The IMI actors shall provide privacy statements in an appropriate form.

All personal data relating to the data subjects of information exchanges, which are exchanged between competent authorities and processed in IMI, shall be erased six months after the formal closure of an information exchange, unless erasure before that period is expressly requested by a competent authority to the Commission.

Where such a request is made, the Commission shall act upon it within 10 working days subject to the agreement of the other competent authority involved.

Personal data relating to IMI users, as referred to in Article 6, shall be stored in IMI as long as they continue to be users of IMI and shall be erased by the competent authority when they are no longer users.

The personal data referred to in the first paragraph shall include the full name, professional e-mail address, professional telephone and fax numbers of the IMI users.