Conservatives are fined 10,000 GBP for sending emails to people who didn’t ask for them

Conservatives have been fined 10,000 GBP by the data Watchdog for sending emails to 51 people about marketing who did not want to receive them. These messages were sent as Boris Johnson in the 8 days following his election as prime minister in 2019. The Conservatives said that they accepted the fine and said that they’d bettered the procedures. It is against legislation to send marketing emails directly, unless the recipient had given their consent for this. Between the 24th of July to the 31st of July Conservatives had sent out over a million marketing emails. The ICO says that ‘some’ of the emails were ‘sent validly’ but the party did not have consent from 51 of the recipients. The Watchdog says that problem was because of the Conservative Party’s failure to transfer records of some who had unsubscribed from the emails when the party had changed their email provider. The director of investigations at the ICO – Stephen Eckersley said that it was ‘really concerning that such large scale processing occurred during the ICO’s ongoing investigation and before the Conservative Party had taken all the steps necessary to ensure its processing, and database of people who would receive emails, was fully compliant with the data protection and electronic marketing regulations’.