Article 16 of the GDPR says, among other things, that
The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her.
A normal person would take that to mean you have the right to have substantive errors in your records corrected. Things like age, arrest record, employment record and so on. Errors that can cause actual harm if not corrected. A Brussels court has ruled that it also means that European Union citizens also have the right to have their name represented correctly.
This is why everyone hates lawyers. The issue is that many names have diacritical marks—Erdős or Ceaușescu for example—and older computer systems are unable to represent them. This is a particular issue in the banking industry that, sadly, is often still running their businesses on last-century IBM mainframes that use the EBCDIC character encoding system.
It’s hard to imagine today but bytes weren’t always 8 bits, and ASCII, let alone UTF-8, wasn’t always the way characters were encoded. EBCDIC was IBM’s system and as the 800 pound gorilla they saw to it that EBCDIC’s use was widespread. The problem is that its standard code page had no diacritical marks so someone named, say, José Ramírez is going to have his name encoded as “Jose Ramirez”.
Someone with way too much time on his hands decided that was intolerable and sued under Article 16. Now the Court of Appeals of Brussels has agreed and demanded that the bank fix things. It’s hard to imagine a quick fix for this and it’s even harder to see how the fix is not going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Of course lawyers don’t know or care about any of this. They just want it fixed. Now. That’s why we all hate them.
If I were the bank, I’d suggest that this particular customer find another bank but the lawyers probably won’t like that solution either. Yes, yes. I know I’m intolerant. I know I’m not a European. I know my name doesn’t have a diacritical—but it’s misspelled so often it might as well have. But, you know, a little common sense would be appropriate here. No one—no one—is going to be confused when they see “Jose Ramirez” instead of “José Ramírez” but the lawyers among us still think it’s a critical issue. This is the very apotheosis of a first world problem.
UPDATE
Added verbiage to make it clear that José Ramírez is a made up example.