Following the news that Bounty UK has been fined 400,000 pounds sterling for data misuse, Your Baby Club, currently the UK’s fastest growing mum’s community, has reacted with disappointment at the data processes used by fellow baby clubs. Bounty Data Handling Fine
It was recently uncovered that Bounty had breached the 1998 Data Protection Act by not being ‘open and transparent’ and illegally sharing the personal information of more than 14 million people. In a statement released by the ICO, Steve Eckersley, ICO’s Director of Investigations, said, ‘The number of personal records and people affected in this case is unprecedented in the history of the ICO’s investigations into the data broking industry and organisations linked to this. Bounty were not open or transparent to the millions of people that their personal data may be passed on to such a large number of organisations. Bounty’s actions appear to have been motivated by financial gain, given that data sharing was an integral part of their business model at the time.’
Your Baby Club, who has an extensive reach of 80% of new mums in the UK and is one of the major players in the industry, has always affirmed their point of difference in data handling, achieving GDPR compliance for it’s many blue-chip clients, well in advance of the May 2019 deadline.
Your Baby Club’s parent company FanFinders (the UK’s largest membership software providers) was created to put the control of mum’s information back into their hands and to develop a fair exchange of marketing consent. FanFinders is proud to say it does not pass personal data to third parties without explicit consent to do so, and as a result, only the highest quality connections are created, ensuring lifetime value and repeat purchase, and allowing people to choose who they want to speak with in exchange for value offered to them by brands.
FanFinders’ CMO, Neil Stephenson, comments, ‘In the past 12 months, two of the main pregnancy club suppliers, Bounty UK and Emma’s Diary, have been found to be breaching data regulations, and it is disappointing that these businesses were unscrupulously selling information to anyone who wanted to buy it. We built a GDPR compliant platform before GDPR existed as we value our customer’s privacy and we only deal with data based on consumer’s consent.”
Alec Dobbie, CEO at FanFinders, adds, “In the data world many complain about GDPR but I believe it has given us an opportunity to do data acquisition correctly. At FanFinders, we give consumers clear up front choices, and we ask transparent brand-led questions, not Ltd or holding companies’ names. It is important to us to put the consumer in charge of what we do and we do this by being upfront and obvious.”
Undeniably, GDPR has caused turmoil within the data industry and although it is too late for those who have suffered years of harassment at the hands of these companies, it is important that, moving forward, companies are transparent about how they are handling customer’s information.
