Note to HR. Don't even look at marketroid candidates with Flybe, Honda and Morrisons on their CV.
ICO fines Morrisons for emailing customers who didn't want to be emailed
Supermarket chain Morrisons has been fined £10,500 by the UK's data protection watchdog for sending marketing emails to people who had unsubscribed from marketing bumf. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said the company had broken the law when it deliberately sent more than 200,000 emails to people who had previously …
COMMENTS
-
-
-
Friday 16th June 2017 12:25 GMT macjules
+1 to that
"We sent out an information message to a small percentage of our customers that aimed to provide some helpful information about our service. We did this with the best of intentions and we're disappointed that this was deemed to be 'marketing material'."
In other words, they deliberately targeted customers who had opted out of emails?
-
-
Friday 16th June 2017 12:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
"sounds like a good deal to me"
Sounds like a fair price to me. Given the low conversion rates on spam, this is probably easily high enough to make such activities uneconomic. There's the reputational damage that they get from being fined for this, and repeat offending would be a serious aggravating factor if the company does it again, meaning a proportionately higher fine. Even if the ICO fined them millions, who'd end up paying? Ultimately customers would, or rank and file employees would suffer because the company would "cut costs" to offset the impact on investors.
I've seen this before where companies have an opt in/out and regardless of what you select, you "mistakenly" get included in the spam list, so I'm pleased to see the ICO dishing out some fines. If I really distrust the company then I'll take a screenprint of my opt out selection, and save that, though so far I've not yet had the delight of sending one of those to the ICO.
-
-
-
-
Friday 16th June 2017 17:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "We sent out an information message"
a postal marketing campaign, which Virgin Media seem to be happy dropping though my door on a weekly basis
Two solutions:
a) If you don't want the mail, return it marked "not known at this address". Works a treat even if you're a customer, and I suspect the cost of dealing with RTS mail is triple that of the original mail shot. The downside is that you've saved them money after three subsequent cancelled mailshots.
b) If (like me) you're a customer and hate Virginmedia because of their crap service, offshoring, and persistent price hikes, then put the junk mail in the bin. They'll keep on sending it, you keep binning it, and that way you're keeping up their marketing costs.
-
Sunday 18th June 2017 08:14 GMT Pompous Git
Re: "We sent out an information message"
"If you don't want the mail, return it marked "not known at this address". Works a treat..."
Doesn't work with The Greens who have been regularly sending me stuff for several decades now. I just burn it in the stove. More plant food/toxic poison [delete whichever is inapplicable] for the atmosphere :-) -
Sunday 18th June 2017 08:57 GMT Spamfast
Re: "We sent out an information message"
Most of the junk mail I get is un-addressed which apparently gets around my MPS registration. It is almost all delivered by the postman doing normal deliveries - indeed much of it proudly displays a 'delivered by Royal Mail' logo.
I simply take it with me in the morning and put it into a Royal Mail post box for them to recycle.
I am hoping, perhaps naively, that if enough of us do this it will become uneconomical for Royal Mail and we'd save a lot of resources.
-
Monday 19th June 2017 08:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Royal Mail junk deliveries
They too offer an opt-out for unaddressed mail, one postie got into trouble for telling householders on his round a few years back, that had the benefit of getting national news coverage so we all got to hear about the option. For the postie in question the junk delivery meant a heavier sack and a longer round as he needed to visit houses that had no other mail that day.
I enquired and received a document stating that some unaddressed mail might be important communications from government or local authority notices. I had to a form to sign to confirm I was happy with that. I signed and years later I'm still getting all the junk. After a while I asked my postie about it and he said opted-out addresses get a note to that effect on their pigeon hole and mine hadn't got one but he also said it was easier for him to just deliver the crap to everyone so if I didn't mind binning it that was easier for him.
What Royal Mail could do is ask every household to opt in or out. Advertisers response rates must be well under 1%, if the junk only went to opted in addresses surely it would be worth the advertisers paying a lot more. Everyone wins, less postie time wasted, fewer unhappy recipients, several kilos of leaflets saved (per year, per household), advertisers waste less money and can afford to spend more on better materials and better targeting.
-
Monday 19th June 2017 09:25 GMT poopoo
Re: "We sent out an information message"
If there's a paid return envelope use that, mark it "junk mail return" and stuff it with anything else you can find to get the weight up. With Raddled Old Whore (sorry "Virgin" Media) , I would almost be tempted to add a dollop of excreta but this is illegal and unfair to staff who probably get enough metaphorical shit dumped on them already.
-
-
-
Friday 16th June 2017 12:37 GMT Doctor Syntax
A Morrisons spokesperson told The Register: "We sent out an information message to a small percentage of our customers that aimed to provide some helpful information about our service. We did this with the best of intentions and we're disappointed that this was deemed to be 'marketing material'."
The ICO should fine them again for this response; clearly they didn't learn.
A more appropriate response would be "We shouldn't have done this. The employees responsible have decided to seek fresh opportunities elsewhere.".
-
Friday 16th June 2017 16:14 GMT Alan Brown
"The ICO should fine them again for this response; clearly they didn't learn."
Aye.
I'm minded of a 1990s incident in New Zealand where the Ministry of Commerce heavily fined a computer distie for _deliberately_ selling 486 motherboards with fake cache ram (remember that stuff?), then turned around and tripled the fine after the company sent out email and other messages saying that it was an honest mistake and they didn't mean to do it.
As far as the MoC was concerned - because they'd determined the sales were deliberate(*), trying to wriggle out of it with customers constituted a breach of the judgement (and contempt of court).
(*) I encountered one of these boards, the BIOS was tweaked to lie, but Linux wasn't fooled. The supplier was notified and told us they knew about it, but kept shipping the boards.
-
Friday 16th June 2017 18:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
"A Morrisons spokesperson told The Register: "We sent out an information message to a small percentage of our customers that aimed to provide some helpful information about our service. We did this with the best of intentions and we're disappointed that this was deemed to be 'marketing material'."
Over to the words of Sir Ken Morrison, former Chairman, at their 2014 AGM:
To loud applause, Sir Ken, who took up farming after retiring from Morrisons, said “I have something like 1,000 bullocks and having listened to your presentation I can say that you’ve got a lot more bull***t than I have.”
-
Saturday 17th June 2017 12:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
The ICO should fine them again for this response; clearly they didn't learn.
Let's see if they appeal. If they appeal, they forgo the 20% early payment discount. I suspect that they won't appeal, and they will therefore technically admit their guilt, even whilst they publicly protest that they somehow weren't guilty.
I agree, though, that the ICO should call them out. It clearly was marketing material, and for some corporate f***wit to claim otherwise - well, if Morrisons are so f***ing disappointed, lets see them appeal this through the courts.
-
-
Friday 16th June 2017 13:13 GMT Richard Boyce
Sainsbury's did worse
In 2010 ( think), Sainsbury's were sending out marketing emails despite my account settings recording that I had opted out. Towards Xmas, they were sending emails most days using a third party spamming house. My complaints and instructions to delete my account information were not acted upon.
I considered getting heavy with them, but instead I set an email filter to forward all Sainbury's emails back to Sainsbury's, with the hope that they would automatically acknowledge receiving each one.
It wasn't until five years later that I found the filter was no longer needed, and they got another order from me. During that time, all my online grocery shopping went to rivals. Ultimately, that's the real cost of doing this sort of thing, not a token fine.
-
Friday 16th June 2017 15:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sainsbury's did worse
> I considered getting heavy with them, but instead I set an email filter to forward all Sainbury's emails back to Sainsbury's, with the hope that they would automatically acknowledge receiving each one.
I think a 'modern' equivalent would be to auto-tweet @Sainsburys: "Congratulations Sainsburys. You've just committed a breach of Regulation 22 of The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, 2003. Enjoy your fine.
-
Saturday 17th June 2017 17:20 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Sainsbury's did worse
"Ultimately, that's the real cost of doing this sort of thing, not a token fine."
No, it's not, because those us like you are a tiny drop in the ocean of customers who don't give a shit, are apathetic about it (cost of doing business, it's just how world is nowadays) or actually think the retailer cares about them personally.
Paris, because she cares!
-
-
Friday 16th June 2017 13:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Poor legal filtering
It's strange how corporates make up reasons for NOT doing something based on what they interpret are "health and safety" laws*, but are happy to interpret wrongly information laws.
* - It's like Kryten's space corps directives in Red Dwarf sometimes - can't do that because three ginger haired toupee wearers are in the car park
-
Friday 16th June 2017 13:34 GMT Cynical Observer
Far from unique
Starting to lose count of the number of companies who think it's OK to lob a speculative email almost exactly one year after the last speculative email which prompted me to unsubscribe from them.
They seem to operate as if there's an aspect of the law that allows them to dredge up old contacts, chuck them on a new list and off we go again.
Bar Stewards!
-
Monday 19th June 2017 08:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
I went to a Business Link sponsored presentation on Email marketing a few years ago. The presenter was from a business that ran email marketing programmes for SMEs. He was touting for business. He explained that on one occasion he had inadvertently sent a mailshot to the list of addressees who had opted out. He said that had generated more leads than when he sent the mailing to the right list. He didn't go so far as to recommend this as an effective strategy but the implication was clear.
-
Tuesday 12th September 2017 09:05 GMT Wiltshire
The crucial weasel-phrase is "implied consent".
I once worked in a place with a mailing list of c. 3 million people. We (in IT) looked at the ICO guidelines on marketing preferences (optins). We told the Marketing Team that if we took the guidelines literally, it meant (a) we should now only mail c.10K of the names on the existing list, and (b) new account registration forms should not have the "send me spam" checkbox ticked by default. The Marketing Team shat themselves. They decided we had "implied consent" to carry on emailing all the accounts. By adding more things to opt-out of. Educational mailings, professional development mailings, third-party material mailings, and so on. With obscure unsubscribe links that automagically went to a data-silo that strangely never got sync'd with the live database.
Just don't call them Marketing optins, OK?