Relief may be at hand for people who are sick of being flooded by spam emails from every second company they have ever dealt with by email. Ever tried getting off a spam list?
Iconic pub chain J.D. Wetherspoons has decided to delete its entire email mailing list and will suspend its newsletter services, an email from chief executive John Hutson has revealed. Privacy campaigners hope the dramatic turnaround by Wetherspoons will be followed by other firms and that it is a sign that government restrictions on spam email are finally starting to change corporate behaviour.
The move by Wetherspoons, announced on June 23, was driven by a desire to stop using a email marketing strategy that the pub chain conceded was “considered intrusive” by many customers. It came after several other companies had been fined for sending marketing messages to people who did not explicitly consent to receive emails.
The exact number of deleted email addresses is not known but in 2015 it was reported after a breach of Wetherspoons’s customer database that it held 656,723 email addresses. In the same attack the details of almost 100 credit cards were stolen.
Car manufacturer Honda was fined £13,000 in March by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after sending 289,790 emails asking customers whether they wanted to receive promotional emails.
Airline Flybe was fined £70,000 by the ICO in the same month for sending more than 3.3 million emails asking customers to update their marketing preferences, and offering customers the chance to be “entered into a prize draw” for contributing.
In June, Morrisons was fined £10,500 for sending 131,000 emails to people who had already opted out of marketing related to Morrisons’s loyalty card. Like Flybe and Honda, Morrisons was found to have breached the PECR rules policing such behaviour. According to the ICO, the email message from Morrisons acknowledged that cardholders had opted out of such emails – then asked them to change their preferences to start receiving coupons and points.
“On a risk basis, it’s just not worth holding large amounts of customer data which is bringing insufficient value,” says Jon Baines, chair of the National Association of Data Protection and Freedom of Information Officers. “This could be the case even where the organisation is clear on which customers have given consent to marketing and which haven’t.”
Fines for breaking the PECR law can reach a maximum of £500,000 but under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will be active from May 2018, offending firms could be fined up to 4% of their global turnover.
Wetherspoons has quite a fan base in the UK but appears to have decided that between the risks of being fined by the ICO and hacked like it was in 2015, it is simply safer to delete all its customer data rather than risk further legal action. In the meantime, the pub chain will promote deals on its website, as well as on its Twitter and Facebook pages, but stop the spam
By Alessandro Mascellino
The post Privacy: A Small Victory Against Spam Companies appeared first on Felix Magazine.
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