Pursuant to the “Information Commissioner’s Office”s (“ICO”) investigation, London-based firm named “Taxed Returned Limited” (“the Company”) has been fined £200,000 by the ICO because of sending 14.8 million marketing text messages without unsolicited consent through a third party service provider between July 2016 and October 2017.
Within the scope of the investigation, ICO underlined that the Company who is the instigator of the campaign should have taken reasonable steps to make sure the data -which has been obtained by them-, complied with the “Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation[1]” (“PECR”) that includes getting specific and prior consent from people receiving the messages.
The Company claimed that the consents were received via generic third party consent found on privacy policies of certain websites. Nevertheless, the ICO determined that mentioned policies was not clear enough and that the Company or the third party service provider were not listed on most of those privacy policies. In this direction, the ICO has also served an enforcement notice on the Company to stop the illegal marketing activity.
You may reach the monetary penalty notice hereby and the enforcement notice hereby.
If there is need of any other information about the article, please contact the below stated person.
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Ersin Nazalı Managing Partner, Attorney, CPA enazali@nazali.av.tr |
Hatice Zümbül Director, Litigation and Dispute Resolution hzumbul@nazali.av.tr |
[1] The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003”; (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2426/made , 17.12.2018)