Easylife Limited, one of the UK's largest home and garden catalogue retailers, has been fined £1.48 million by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). The fine relates to two separate violations.
The ICO fined Easylife £1.35 million for violations under Article 5(1)(a) of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) after the company used the purchase history of 145,000 customers without consent to make assumptions about their health and target them with related products. The ICO investigation uncovered significant customer profiling that was hidden from customers, a breach of data protection law. Information Commissioner John Edwards said, "the lack of transparency, combined with the intrusive nature of the profiling, has resulted in a serious breach of people's information rights."
In addition, the ICO fined Easylife £130,000 for contravening regulation 21 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR) after it made 1,345,732 unsolicited direct marketing calls to individuals registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), resulting in 25 complaints.
Read the ICO monetary penalty.
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