How we process your personal data

Here at Arbetsförmedlingen we want you to feel confident that we process your personal data securely. The purpose of this page is to give you comprehensive information about how we process your personal data. This page contains information about what personal data are, how we process them and what rights you have.

General information about personal data

Personal data are all the information that can be connected in any way to a living person. For example, name and personal identity number, but also information that can only be connected to a person indirectly, such as user name, registered address and IP address.

We process personal data for various purposes and in various parts of our operations. We need to do this in order to fulfil our assignment to match jobseekers and vacancies, but also in order to comply with our role as a government agency and employer. Arbetsförmedlingen, as data controller, is responsible for processing your personal data in the correct way and in accordance with laws and regulations.

The personal data that are processed by us are managed in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation and the Swedish Act containing supplementary provisions to the EU General Data Protection Regulation. These laws give you greater protection as an individual when government agencies and companies process your personal data. Our processing of personal data is also governed by an act and ordinance that only apply to Arbetsförmedlingen. These are normally referred to as register legislation.

General Data Protection Regulation (imy.se) (in Swedish)

Act containing supplementary provisions to the EU General Data Protection Regulation (riksdagen.se) (in Swedish)

Act (2002:546) on processing of personal data in labour market policy activities (riksdagen.se) (in Swedish)

Ordinance (2002:623) on processing of personal data in labour market policy activities (riksdagen.se) (in Swedish)

Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act (2009:400) (riksdagen.se) (in Swedish)

When, how and why we process your personal data

In order for us to be allowed to process your personal data there needs to be what are known as legal grounds. Legal grounds are, for example, when the processing takes place within the scope of us exercising our official authority or conducting tasks that are in the public interest. We process the majority of personal data under this legal ground. However, we can also process personal data if there are legal requirements or agreements with the registered person that require personal data to be processed.

We only process personal data for specific purposes. We process the personal data of employers, jobseekers, suppliers and employees so that we are able to deal with cases, evaluate our activities, conduct supervision and conduct our labour market policy activities in other ways. We can also process personal data for reasons that are of benefit to society such as for archival purposes in the public interest, statistical or historical research purposes.

Below we describe how your personal data is processed in some common situations.

Arbetsförmedlingen ensures that the processing of personal data is protected by appropriate technical and organisational measures. You decide, together with us, what information about you may be disclosed to other parties. Only specialised administrators at Arbetsförmedlingen handle your personal data when your identity is protected.

In order to work efficiently and ensure that you as a jobseeker receive the most appropriate help, we use jobseekers’ personal data to carry out what we call profiling. Profiling involves a form of automatic processing of personal data in order to assess and predict certain personal qualities of an individual. We use profiling to help our employment officers assess which measure is best suited to a specific jobseeker.

This processing takes place in accordance with the legal ground ‘public interest’ and/or as a part of us exercising our official authority.

Assessment and profiling

In order for us to be able to administer a case we need to process certain personal data. Personal data are often obtained directly from you, e.g. via registering or activity reports. When you register we ask for certain personal data such as your name, personal identity number and registered address. However, we also need to process data relating to your potential to find a job such as education, skills, work experience and other information that is important to your case. We also process data that relates to which activities you as a jobseeker have done in order to get closer to finding work, for example number of jobs applied for and participation in activities. We are also allowed to process the personal data needed for the benefits you receive or for the programmes or measures you take part in. This means that the personal data processed varies depending on your specific situation.

This processing takes place in accordance with the legal ground ‘public interest’ and/or as a part of us exercising our official authority.

We have a duty to ensure that benefits and other types of measures are only paid to those jobseekers and employers who comply with the requirements for the measure in question, as well as to independent providers who have fulfilled their obligations in accordance with their agreement with Arbetsförmedlingen and in accordance with the law. This means that we review discrepancies and activity reports in order to prevent incorrect payments. We also check information about employers and independent providers continuously, as well as their personnel, in order to make risk assessments and ensure that support is given based on the correct grounds and to the right recipient.

This processing is undertaken on the legal basis of “public interest” and/or as a part of us exercising our official authority.

When we handle invoices for our suppliers, we use personal data in some cases. In the case of invoices relating to purchased services performed by a specific person, we may need to register and store personal names in our financial system.

For various forms of payments and debt management matters, we register customer data that also includes private individuals if the company is a sole proprietorship. In our program operations, where you as a program participant are the formal customer, no personal data about you appears in our financial system.

We use personal data in order to produce anonymised statistics. This means that we keep your data in a particular place and use these personal data to produce statistics in which your identity is not revealed. We use these depersonalised statistics for purposes such as planning, reporting results to the Government and to evaluate our activities.

This processing takes place in accordance with the legal ground ‘public interest’ and/or as a part of us exercising our official authority.

When you log into My Pages in order to use our electronic services we process your personal data in a way that is similar to a physical identity check. We process your name and personal identity number when you log in and sign documents electronically in order to check that your e-ID is authentic and valid.

This processing takes place in accordance with the legal ground ‘public interest’ and/or as a part of us exercising our official authority.

We will use your personal data to make and send you targeted information. It is information that we think you may be interested in.

The information we use can be place of residence, date of birth, events and content of contacts with us and our suppliers who carry out labor market policy efforts on behalf of the Swedish Public Employment Service.

When you contact us we process the information you submit in order to enable us to give you the help you are asking for. This means that we process your contact details such as the telephone number or e-mail address you use to contact us and IP address if you contact us via the chat function. If identification is required, we also need to process the personal data needed to confirm your identity. Depending on which contact method you choose, you may be asked whether you want to participate in an optional survey after contacting us.

This processing takes place in accordance with the legal ground ‘public interest’ and/or as a part of us exercising our official authority.

How we process your personal data when you contact us (in Swedish)

We use cookies on arbetsformedlingen.se in order to improve the website for visitors. A cookie is a small text file that is stored on your computer and contains information about how you use our website. We use a program to display information about how visitors use the website in order to improve our website and other services. We process visitors’ IP addresses in order to analyse how they use our website.

Your data is always anonymized

In order to analyze how visitors' use our website, we process the IP number of the visitor. The data that is collected is anonymized so that no one can be identify as a single individual. We also never share this data with third parties. All services used for data collection are operated in environments within the borders of Sweden and which are dedicated to the Swedish Public Employment Service. This processing takes place according to the legal basis in the public interest and/or as part of our exercise of authority.

About cookies and how to turn them off (in Swedish)

We process your personal data in the recruitment process in order to carry out correct an efficient recruitment. The personal data we process are those that you provide yourself in your application, are noted during the interview sessions and results from tests (test results). In order for you to be able to apply for a job at Arbetsförmedlingen, we must process your personal data. If you do not provide us with your personal data, we cannot accept your application. The processing of your personal data in a recruitment is necessary for two reasons. To assess your merit and skill, and to live up to the requirements for public recruitment, according to the law on public employment, which the Swedish Public Employment Agency is obliged to follow. Arbetsförmedlingen therefore handle your personal data on the legal basis of "public interest".

According to the principle of publicity, the Swedish Public Employment Service is obliged to preserve documents that come to the authority in a recruitment case. The documents are kept for 24 months. If you apply for other jobs with us within six months, we may re-use the test results we have about you from previous recruitment because problem-solving ability and personality are characteristics that have been shown to be relatively stable over time and to prevent possible training effects and to increase accuracy.

With four exceptions, we will not pass your personal data to any other organization during the recruitment process. Your personal data will be used by Varbi, which supplies our recruitment system, Aon'Assessment Solutions, which is a supplier of test tools, with Refapp, which is a supplier of reference-taking tools and Realcruit, supplier of the tool to measure candidate experience. None of these companies have the right to pass on your personal data.

Our recruitment process (in Swedish)

Where your personal data comes from and who we share it with

Most data is collected directly from those who are registered. This happens, for example, when you register or report your activities. Sometimes we receive information about you from other actors. For example, we receive civil status records from the Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket) and information about attendance at planned activities from our private providers.

In certain cases we need to share your personal data with other actors. Sometimes that is done so that our activities can be run in the best possible way. But sometimes we share personal data if the data are needed for the recipient’s activities. This applies for certain listed actors, namely:

  • The Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Försäkringskassan)
  • The Swedish Board of Student Finance (Centrala studiestödsnämnden)
  • Unemployment insurance funds
  • The Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket)
  • The Swedish Unemployment Insurance Inspectorate (Inspektionen för arbetslöshetsförsäkringen)
  • The Swedish Enforcement Authority (Kronofogdemyndigheten)
  • Social welfare committees
  • The Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket)
  • Our private providers

We also need to share data with other actors if we are obliged to do so by law. This primarily applies with regard to other government agencies.

Since we are a government agency, we are also obliged to adhere to the principle of publicity to official documents. The principle means that the Swedish Public Employment Service must release information from public documents if someone requests to see them if the information is public. If the information is covered by confidentiality, we will not release it. Confidentiality is governed by the Publicity and Confidentiality Act (2009:400). In the activities of the Swedish Public Employment Service, the regulations in chapter 28, §§ 11, 12 and 12a apply.

How long is your personal data stored?

The personal data we process is often included in public documents. This means that, in many cases, we must, by law, store personal data for a certain amount of time. The main rule is that jobseekers’ personal data and documents that contain personal data about jobseekers have to be removed from our computer systems no more than three years after the case has been concluded. After this, the personal data are separated and can be used to produce statistics for another ten years. Public documents about jobseekers are then, by law, archived for use in future research and are then made available to Arbetsförmedlingen’s administrators.

Your rights

This section only discusses your rights in relation to processing of your personal data. If you would like to access a public document you should instead use the below form. If you are unhappy with a decision you have received from us, or if you have other feedback about our administration of a case or our activities, you can contact us using the link below.

Form for accessing public documents (in Swedish)

Comments about our activities (in Swedish)

Request a register extract

Those who are registered have a right to receive information about which personal data we process and why we process them. You receive this information in what is known as a register extract. The extract will be sent within a month of you requesting it.

Right to rectification and to supplement incomplete personal data

If you think that we have registered inaccurate personal data about you, it is possible to ask us to rectify the data. This also means that you have a right to supplement personal data that is incomplete with data that is relevant given the purpose of the personal data processing. The contents of completed public documents cannot be amended as a rule but we always examine individual cases.

Right to erasure

In some limited cases, those who are registered have the right to have their personal data removed from our registers. This right only applies in certain individual cases when data for example have been processed unlawfully or when erasure is required in order to comply with a legal obligation. The main rule is that the contents of completed public documents cannot be amended, but we always conduct a review in each individual case.

Right to restriction of processing

In certain cases you may have the right to request that the processing of your personal data be restricted. Restriction means that the data is marked so that, in future, these can only be processed for certain restricted purposes. The right to restriction of processing applies in cases such as when you are of the opinion that the data is inaccurate and you have requested rectification. In such cases you can also request that the processing of the data be restricted while the accuracy of the data is being investigated.

Right to object

In certain cases, you can object to our processing of your personal data. The right to object applies, for example, when the personal data is processed in order to carry out a task in the public interest as part of the exercise of official authority or when profiling is taking place. However, the right to object does not apply to processing that is permitted in accordance with our register statutes.

Act (2002:546) on processing of personal data in labour market policy activities (riksdagen.se) (in Swedish)

Right to data portability

Those who have submitted their personal data have, in certain cases, the right to access and use this personal data elsewhere, for example in another social media service. We may be obliged to facilitate such a transfer of personal data when this is technically possible. One prerequisite is that we are processing the personal data with support of your consent or in order to comply with an agreement made with you.

Request erasure, register extract, rectification or information about personal data

If you have comments or complaints about our processing

Contact our data protection officer

If you have questions or comments about our personal data processing you can contact our data protection officer. The role of the data protection officer is to check that the General Data Protection Regulation is complied with by, for example, carrying out checks and by distributing information.

E-mail address: dataskyddsombud@arbetsformedlingen.se
Telephone: +46 771-60 00 00
Visitors’ address: Elektrogatan 4, Solna
Postal address:
Arbetsförmedlingen
Dataskyddsombud
113 99 Stockholm

Contact the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten)

You can also contact the Authority for Privacy Protection to make a complaint, if you have any feedback or if you are unhappy about the way we process your personal data.

Contact the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (imy.se) (in Swedish)