Pregnancy club fined £400k for selling on data

PReGNaNCy and parenting club Bounty UK has been fined £400,000 for illegally sharing the personal data of 14million people.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued the fine in what it described as an ‘unprecedented’ case in both nature and scale.

Bounty collected personal information from parents-to-be and new mothers at hospital bedsides who signed up to become members. However, it failed to tell them that these details would be shared with 39 other organisations.

Investigators said the company ‘appears to have been motivated by financial gain’ as data- sharing was an integral part of its business model.

Bounty, which has worked with the NHS for half a century and has a turnover of around £ 15million, provides advice and support for parenting as well as free samples and moneyoff coupons. The fine is among the highest ever issued, with Carphone Warehouse and TalkTalk also made to pay £400,000 for data breaches in 2015 and Facebook fined £500,000 over the Cambridge analytica scandal.

Bounty said it has now changed how it handles member data. The ICO found it shared about 34.4million records between June 2017 and april last year with credit referpeople ence and marketing agencies, including acxiom, equifax, Indicia and Sky.

The information it shared did not only belong to vulnerable new mothers or mothers-to-be, but also included the birth date and gender of a child.

ICO director of investigations Steve eckersley said: ‘ The number of personal records and people affected in this case is unprecedented.

‘Bounty were not open or transparent to the millions of that their personal data may be passed on to such a large number of organisations. any consent given by these people was clearly not informed.’ None of the firm’s registration forms asked those filling them in to opt- in for marketing purposes.

Jim Kelleher, managing director of Bounty, said it has reduced the number of personal records it retains and how long it keeps information for.

‘We acknowledge the ICO’s findings – in the past we did not take a broad enough view of our responsibilities and as a result our data- sharing processes, specifically with regards to transparency, were not robust enough,’ he said.

Last year it emerged the Labour Party bought data on more than a million new and expectant mothers and their children from a leading baby club ahead of the 2017 election.

emma’s diary was fined £140,000 after it gave more than a million records to the data broking firm experian, which then loaded the records into a database for Labour to use in a direct marketing mail campaign.

‘Not open or transparent’