The ICO have issued a couple of fines relating to direct marketing offences.
Of most interest will be the Honda fine. Honda contacted a number of customers via email to ask them if they were happy to receive marketing emails. ICO declared this a breach of PECR due to the fact the customers hadn’t consented to the use of their email in this way. Honda believed they were OK to do this as they were simply asking for consent, but the ICO reminds us all that if you don’t have consent at the point of collection of the email address you can’t just use the email address to seek that consent, as that is itself direct marketing.
This is a very timely manner with the GDPR’s consent rules. If businesses are thinking that they don’t have consent for all their data for marketing purposes, they can’t just email them to ask. As the ICO put’s it “Businesses must understand they can’t break one law to get ready for another.”
More details of the fines here: https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-blogs/2017/03/ico-warns-uk-firms-to-respect-customers-data-wishes-as-it-fines-flybe-and-honda/
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