ICO fined several companies for data protection infringements

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) has fined several companies at the beginning of June for data protection infringements.

All fines have in common that the fined companies conducted marketing measures without having the required consent for doing so.

• Conservative Party

The ICO has fined the Conservative Party £10,000 for sending 51 marketing emails without having the required legal basis and in violation of Regulation 22 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation 2003 (PECR).

The Conservative Party sent out a total of 1.190.280 marketing emails between July 24th and July 31st 2019, right after the election and in the name of Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP.

The ICO investigated that the party failed to ensure having a valid legal basis for marketing emails when changing the email provider. Even though the ICO assumes that there are more than 51 concerned data subjects, the ICO only received complaints of 51 individuals, thus the fine is based on this amount of concerned data subjects.

• Colour Car Sales Ltd.

The ICO has fined Colour Car Sales Ltd (CCSL)  £170,000  for sending spam text messages from October 2018 to January 2020. CCSL is a credit intermediary for used car finance and the purpose of the spam texts was to direct the recipients to car finance websites.

Also in this case basis for the fine has been complaints of concerned data subjects which complained about not have given consent for receiving marketing emails from CCSL.

• Solarwave of Grays

The ICO has fined Solarwave of Grays £100,000 for conducting 73.217 marketing calls about solar panel maintenance from January to October 2020.

The complainants that raised the concerns stated that they were registered with the Telephone Preference Service and should have received any marketing telephone calls based on this.

The Telephone Preference Service is the UK’s “do not call register” with which individuals can register to show that they are not interested in receiving any kind of marketing phone calls.

Beside the violation of the data protection law and the Telephone Preferences Service the concerned data subjects also stated that the callers were rude and persistent and ignored stop requests.

• LTH Holdings

The ICO has fined LTH Holding, a Cardiff based telephone marketing company, £145,000 for conducting 1.4 million calls trying to sell funeral plans between May 2019 and May 2020.

In this case the ICO received 41 complaints and the complainants were also registered with the Telephone Preferences Service. Beside this infringement, the concerned data subjects also told the ICO that LTH adopted aggressive, coercive and persuasive methods to sell funeral plans.

• Papa John’s

The ICO has fined Papa John’s Limited, a national takeaway pizza company, £10,000 for sending 168,022 nuisance marketing messages to its customers.

In this case the ICO received 15 complaints also stating the distress and annoyance the messages were causing. Some customers received up to 100 messages in two months without ever have given consent for marketing emails.

The ICO investigated that Papa John’s has sent over 210.000 messages to customers between October 1st 2019 and April 30th 2020.

In the contrary to the opinion of Papa John’s the ICO did not see the possibility to rely on “soft opt-in” because the data used for the marketing emails has been obtained for processing orders and not receiving marketing emails. Furthermore, the required information of the customers on this processing activity is missing.